Many RPG games, I was not able to finish in a few weeks. The first Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation I never gave away, not because of the game, but after I beat that, I kept at the training exercises.
Although I cannot account for console games today, I play mostly flash games. Even pay for a few.
Maybe even scheme although it is sometimes too minimalistic. Some languages such as C naturally incline toward a specific structure like imperative, some don't. But avoid C unless they are expected to write low level code.
Why? Because out in the "real world", you are usually assaulted with C or it's derivatives. Not because these are the best languages, but they were faster when developed and took a strong foothold over the thinking of the programming community. It's rather a self perpetuating cycle like Microsoft Windows and operating systems. Another reason is that C/C++ is low level language masquerading as a high level one, with libraries to cover some of it's more glaring defiencies.
Yes, they'll eventually have to learn C/C++ or a descendant, but that is not the point: it is because they'll have to learn C/C++ that you should teach them something else. Otherwise once you teach them C, mental inertia takes over and they'll be stuck in the C mindset for the rest of their lives and cannot imagine anything else. They'll have time enough to learn C in sophomore or later levels.
Also, I wouldn't worry too much about "paradigms". Learn to attack problems one by one, making a program that fits each one best. Throw a lot of small coding problems at them, actually, to scale them up to bigger tasks. Thinking about a problem is great, but no reason not to learn coding by coding. I remember Paul Graham writing he never had used Object Orientation his entire life, although it would have seemed that some problems were initially screaming out for such a solution on paper. IMO, paradigms are usually taught as a way to evolve or grow a program an ongoing problem, so you don't end up with sloppy, spaghetti code - but I think experience and getting to see the big picture is more important than rigid paradigms. Afterall, most paradigms grew up from an person's experiences with one or a set of closely related problems that may not closely relate to another random set of problems.
Stuff like rabid prototyping, etc, are in view more common sense (and better coding methods) than an exact paradigm.
I don't talk enough on the phone to power it for standby. But what about one powered by motion, much like an automatic watch? Does it generate enough power?
I personally hate batteries, at least the current technology. Perhaps ultra-capacitors one day...
In court, there should (and probably is) extra consideration given how destructive the theft is. There is a big difference where someone steals something that takes an equal amount to replace (say, 5 gallons of gas from a gas station at $2.50 a gallon, or a candy bar, etc.) or where you steal $50 of copper pipes but with a $1500 replacement cost/labor to the home owner. Or the case I heard a while back with car mufflers being stolen for $40 a pop, but the car owner having a replacement cost of $1000 (stolen due to platinum or other trace material expensiver per ounce).
Punishment should also be meted out by how likely the criminal is to be caught in order to be a real deterrent.
Some days, I think your trade of copper to a small quantity of lead is a good idea!:)
Many companies don't want to sell a solution. They'll sell a package (software) that others can make part of their overall solution. I could not imagine many software companies that want to get into the solution business.
Taxes means power. You are answerable to the people you tax in theory (people have a lot more power than they think, they use it in France, us Americans tend to roll over and say "One more, please!" when the politicians fuck us)
Once the corporations pay through ads, they'll get the power. It'll be subtle at first. But you know how PBS always avoided commercials, for fear of being biased going forward with reporting? Same thing here. Imagine Sex Ed where the teacher isn't allowed to talk about the downsides of condoms (they don't protect against everything) because Trojan is sponsoring it.
If something is worth it, it's worth paying for. The world cannot subsist on ads. Eventually those ads get paid for, and the businesses are paying for them for a very good reason.
I'm already (always) been for school uniforms (it cuts down on little timmy not being able to afford brand X, therefore he gets made fun of/bullied). I'm against vending machines in school because of this commercial intrusion. This will be just more of the same. School is to learn, but should not be there to learn to be good little consumers.
I remember high school where to play soccer, they made us go out and sell candy instead of just buying the damned uniforms ourselves. Good waste of time. And the yearly sales of the catalog, where the company profited big time and the school got a cut while thousands of student were out hours, surely parents to who sold to their colleagues at work and what not for their kid. The cost didn't get reduced in that example to the community at large, it probably increased 4 fold so the school could get its 25% cut or what not.
If you ever lived in a foreign country
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 5, Informative
and the US, and watched the evening news - you definitely get a feel that the evening news in America is censored. This is not so much because the hide stories, but just the lack of airtime for most anything worthwhile, while fluff (Arnette's cat gets in a tree and rescued by firefighter, college sports) dominates. International events don't tend to be covered at all, unless it is really grand or some type of American involvement (1000 people die, including 12 American, etc).
Now, I don't think this is a grand conspiracy, but it does have a dumbing down effect - I don't know if it came about because of viewer demand or a few program managers dictating what gets broadcast and other stations imitating them. In the evening news in Canada, UK, France, Germany (countries I personally traveled to) - there is definitely more awareness of what is going in internationally (or even nationally).
With memristors (once they are perfected) can have multi-state such as trinary (base 3) or decinary (base 10) eliminating all of the conversion that is neccessary in the present binary system that require cpu cycles. 123 in the decinary system represents 123 where in binary it would be 1111011 and need to be converted in order to be meaningful.
Um, for the most part, the computer only has to convert from binary to decimal when it displays base 10 numbers on the screen (ie using the calculator). It's hardly computer intensive. All the operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) are going to be in it's native binary, no conversion needed.
Computers convert data all the time - this text you are reading now is really just a series of binary numbers converted to ascii or unicode or whatever with lots of other conversions needed to throw it on the screen.
You meant annoying, right? Like that fly that just doesn't get out of your face with it buzzing. Well, maybe entertaining to a third party, but not anyone affected by them.
OTOH, how many books are worth your time reselling? Textbooks for one if the next class uses them. But most computer books (outside Knuth's or Kernighan & Ritchies of the world) become obsolete really fast. Many Novels get bundled by my local farmer's market for a $1-3 a piece. And are you really going to resell a book on half.com or amazon for $9 or less and go to the bother of going to the post office to ship it and what not? It's not worth it for the time alone.
Convenience: Some book collections are worth good money. One of my friend is an antique dealer and his 1000s reference guides alone from the 1910s to the 1990s are all out of print and would bring money to the right collectors of their niche. But he uses them for work and because he's rather disorganized, they all randomly take up 3 rooms piled here and there and on book cases. If he had them scanned in on a computer, at least, he could at least look through his collection by keywords instead of spending hours flipping through books because he remembers taking a glimpse of some relevant item here or there years back. Which he often wastes a Saturday doing when he would rather be doing other things.
Your point about the physical nature of a book is valid, but I suspect generational. It's the same lament of those who like vinyl records vs CDs or now mp3s. There are definite up and downsides to both mediums, real and perceived, but the next generation will be more easy to take up the next big thing.
You'll be waiting 5 years at least. I'm probably getting an iliad DR1000SW or PlasticLogic's model next year because they finally got the screen size up to snuff.
The economic analysis in the summary at least is a bit shortsighted. You can save a little on newspaper subscriptions since they don't have to deliver to you or you don't have to waste gas getting one and there are a lot of good free (legally) books online to learn languages/programming/anything but don't want to sit on the computer for. Like this one: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ or http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
When I sat down years ago to read those or other books on the computer, it just was a pain. I couldn't use my computer for other things as easily and the eyestrain of a backlighted screen all day. Years back, without a second monitor, it was kinda a pain to follow some programming examples and keep switching back and forth.
Add to that the convenience of having all your books in a memory card or single harddrive. It was a factor driving mp3 music players vs CDs and CDs are much easier to carry around than books.
What is wrong with the current set of books is this: -screen size (recently solved with the iRex DR1000S - now they have models out big and small good for newspaper/technical_reading/textbooks vs fiction) -screen refresh rate (too slow on all models) -only 4 (16 iliad) shades right now -klutzy software (Apple could exploit this market sooner or later) -battery life in some models (e-Ink doesn't use any energy once screen is rendered - yet some manufacturers build these things to be recharged almost daily instead of weekly), turn the page and switch it off -no color
For me, battery life and software and screen size is what I'm not going to compromise on, all others I'm flexible. It probably will be different for everyone. The potential benefits are tremendous though.
That thinking is limited. This isn't a 'newspaper' reader. It reads pretty much anything. What would it have been worth to have all your heavy schoolbooks in this instead of lugging around some heavy bag? And reference guides? I got a lot of free (legally) books off the web to learn computer languages, etc. The small ereaders are not useful for for such things (they are more fiction writing oriented), but this size screen works.
If you also figure Americans (for one) move every seven years - what would it be worth to just have everything on this device and a few memory cards rather than boxes and boxes of books - most left unread past the first chapter anyway statistically? (I'm the type to digitize everything - cds, movies, etc for such convenience).
The price will have to (and will anyway) come down for mass acceptance, but this technology is not mature enough for that stage yet anyway. It's still with the early adopters, most of whom of professionals with disposable income and gadget freaks.
What I wanted to add was that e-ink readers could be incredibly useful beyond the instant newspaper/book, library in your hand idea: especially if they would ever combine it with things something like a stylus version (doesn't exist) of the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen (released this year). The pen has few button, rather relying on 'special' paper that really just has some prearranded dots to orient the pen as well as some functions on the bottom of the sheet for the pen to do it's thing. Since that company also lets you print your own paper, this as an ereader stylus could be combined into something incredible useful. IMO, that would be the future of such things:
Plastic Logic's device, yet to be named, has a highly legible black-and-white display and a screen more than twice as large compared to current versions available on the market."
That's not quite right, the iLiad DR1000S is on the market right now (and the wifi capable DR1000SW in soon) and they both have similiar sized screens (an A4 sized piece of paper sans normal margins). The difference is that these screens are traditional e-ink screens with glass (?) prone to cracking/breaking while Plastic Logic's is flexible.
There are other drawbacks to both. This is Plastic Logic's first device. 1st Generation devices can really suck, not to mention 1st one ever out of a company. iRex's pushed out previous ereaders (iliad) but they all suffer from a battery problem: as I understand it the CPU never really goes to "sleep" - draining the thing in a day. One of the point of e-ink was that it takes no energy once the display is rendered. So obviously this is a drawback. Also, since the battery is non-user changeable it will cost that much more to replace more frequently. They promised to fix it soon, but what are promises worth?
OTOH, iRex recently opensourced much of their software system with more soon to come. Which is a major plus. Also, it has a wacom enabled screen - allowing you to annotate your texts and take notes on it. The problem with all e-ink displays right now is that there will be lag from your writing and it being rendered.
In reality, we're in the opening stages of the e-ink revolution (much like cell phones in the 80's) and that means we won't have a truly GOOD device for many years. Kindle helped really kickstart it. Hopefully we will see color soon, although that is really one of the lower priority things considered.
IMHO, this is a niche that a competent software/hardware company (Apple) could really exploit much like they did in previous 'established' niches when the time comes. Just set up a book section in iTunes and they'd have half the market already.
Not average. For an extreme example, 9 people have 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 IQ respectively and #10 has 150. The average IQ in that room would be 105, and 9 out of 10 would have below average IQ.
Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.
Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.
I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years.
The vast majority of users, in fact, do not pay these fees on anything but an irregular basis, and the fees they do pay, which are rolled into OEM machines, are so low when spread across the time involved that Microsoft's 'raping license fees' work out for your average user somewhere between $20-$30 per year, I would imagine.
Why, as a consumer, can I not buy Windows for a similiar low price, or a low multiple? Why is it in the hundreds of $$$? Why are there over 6 versions of Vista now? Why not just 2?
Possibly. I'm not necessarily convinced that free and open access to information is necessary... or even useful.
Don't use wikipedia then. I use it about 50 times a day. I just contributed $100 toward it because it's that usefull to me. No static, "closed-soure" encyclopedia comes close for me for 'esoteric' topics.
on the blackberry that make it more prone to 'breaking'. I know on many of my gadgets, sometimes it's the mechanical things that are the first to go.
Although, I was going to suggest the iPhone gets better taken care of - perhaps not. It's just a $199 device to many people, that if they break it, just have to shell out that money and extend their contract with AT&T for a new one most likely.
I'm still wondering how they afford it. Was considering between a truly unlocked iPhone from Hong Kong or an iPod Touch for half the price. It's scary either way, and yet still cheaper than the ATT contract.
I'd like to add I like Aptera's approach of putting a small engine in an electrical car and letting it charge the batteries. Many vehicles only use a tiny fraction of their horsepower to maintain speed and the rest is for acceleration, so in an car driven by electrical motors - the gasoline recharging engines can be significantly smaller; 5-20hp (? - my civic has 140hp in comparison); probably just a little more than what's needed to maintain targetted top speed (or up-hill considerations).
And a gasoline or better, a diesel engine is plenty efficient already just for this general approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, someone has to say it.
-low replay value
-short games
Many RPG games, I was not able to finish in a few weeks. The first Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation I never gave away, not because of the game, but after I beat that, I kept at the training exercises.
Although I cannot account for console games today, I play mostly flash games. Even pay for a few.
Maybe even scheme although it is sometimes too minimalistic. Some languages such as C naturally incline toward a specific structure like imperative, some don't. But avoid C unless they are expected to write low level code.
Why? Because out in the "real world", you are usually assaulted with C or it's derivatives. Not because these are the best languages, but they were faster when developed and took a strong foothold over the thinking of the programming community. It's rather a self perpetuating cycle like Microsoft Windows and operating systems. Another reason is that C/C++ is low level language masquerading as a high level one, with libraries to cover some of it's more glaring defiencies.
Yes, they'll eventually have to learn C/C++ or a descendant, but that is not the point: it is because they'll have to learn C/C++ that you should teach them something else. Otherwise once you teach them C, mental inertia takes over and they'll be stuck in the C mindset for the rest of their lives and cannot imagine anything else. They'll have time enough to learn C in sophomore or later levels.
Also, I wouldn't worry too much about "paradigms". Learn to attack problems one by one, making a program that fits each one best. Throw a lot of small coding problems at them, actually, to scale them up to bigger tasks. Thinking about a problem is great, but no reason not to learn coding by coding. I remember Paul Graham writing he never had used Object Orientation his entire life, although it would have seemed that some problems were initially screaming out for such a solution on paper. IMO, paradigms are usually taught as a way to evolve or grow a program an ongoing problem, so you don't end up with sloppy, spaghetti code - but I think experience and getting to see the big picture is more important than rigid paradigms. Afterall, most paradigms grew up from an person's experiences with one or a set of closely related problems that may not closely relate to another random set of problems.
Stuff like rabid prototyping, etc, are in view more common sense (and better coding methods) than an exact paradigm.
I don't talk enough on the phone to power it for standby. But what about one powered by motion, much like an automatic watch? Does it generate enough power?
I personally hate batteries, at least the current technology. Perhaps ultra-capacitors one day...
In court, there should (and probably is) extra consideration given how destructive the theft is. There is a big difference where someone steals something that takes an equal amount to replace (say, 5 gallons of gas from a gas station at $2.50 a gallon, or a candy bar, etc.) or where you steal $50 of copper pipes but with a $1500 replacement cost/labor to the home owner. Or the case I heard a while back with car mufflers being stolen for $40 a pop, but the car owner having a replacement cost of $1000 (stolen due to platinum or other trace material expensiver per ounce).
Punishment should also be meted out by how likely the criminal is to be caught in order to be a real deterrent.
Some days, I think your trade of copper to a small quantity of lead is a good idea! :)
Many companies don't want to sell a solution. They'll sell a package (software) that others can make part of their overall solution. I could not imagine many software companies that want to get into the solution business.
Taxes means power. You are answerable to the people you tax in theory (people have a lot more power than they think, they use it in France, us Americans tend to roll over and say "One more, please!" when the politicians fuck us)
Once the corporations pay through ads, they'll get the power. It'll be subtle at first. But you know how PBS always avoided commercials, for fear of being biased going forward with reporting? Same thing here. Imagine Sex Ed where the teacher isn't allowed to talk about the downsides of condoms (they don't protect against everything) because Trojan is sponsoring it.
If something is worth it, it's worth paying for. The world cannot subsist on ads. Eventually those ads get paid for, and the businesses are paying for them for a very good reason.
I'm already (always) been for school uniforms (it cuts down on little timmy not being able to afford brand X, therefore he gets made fun of/bullied). I'm against vending machines in school because of this commercial intrusion. This will be just more of the same. School is to learn, but should not be there to learn to be good little consumers.
I remember high school where to play soccer, they made us go out and sell candy instead of just buying the damned uniforms ourselves. Good waste of time. And the yearly sales of the catalog, where the company profited big time and the school got a cut while thousands of student were out hours, surely parents to who sold to their colleagues at work and what not for their kid. The cost didn't get reduced in that example to the community at large, it probably increased 4 fold so the school could get its 25% cut or what not.
and the US, and watched the evening news - you definitely get a feel that the evening news in America is censored. This is not so much because the hide stories, but just the lack of airtime for most anything worthwhile, while fluff (Arnette's cat gets in a tree and rescued by firefighter, college sports) dominates. International events don't tend to be covered at all, unless it is really grand or some type of American involvement (1000 people die, including 12 American, etc).
Now, I don't think this is a grand conspiracy, but it does have a dumbing down effect - I don't know if it came about because of viewer demand or a few program managers dictating what gets broadcast and other stations imitating them. In the evening news in Canada, UK, France, Germany (countries I personally traveled to) - there is definitely more awareness of what is going in internationally (or even nationally).
Well, sorry for that arrogant posting on my part thenXD. Didn't even notice the low /. number I was replying to (not that it means everything).
I'll read up more on it then.
Um, for the most part, the computer only has to convert from binary to decimal when it displays base 10 numbers on the screen (ie using the calculator). It's hardly computer intensive. All the operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) are going to be in it's native binary, no conversion needed.
Computers convert data all the time - this text you are reading now is really just a series of binary numbers converted to ascii or unicode or whatever with lots of other conversions needed to throw it on the screen.
Native base 10 has been done before (basically ignoring bits representing 10-15) and all that was found was that it wasted space as conversion in those scenarios are beyond trivial. Here's a book for you:
http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0735611319
got from this, even when it has to pay out the prize it will be very cheap against any going rate.
Would like to see how stupid they (the politicians) are.
You meant annoying, right? Like that fly that just doesn't get out of your face with it buzzing. Well, maybe entertaining to a third party, but not anyone affected by them.
workers these days in the big companies. Do they clock in once they log onto their network or what?
OTOH, how many books are worth your time reselling? Textbooks for one if the next class uses them. But most computer books (outside Knuth's or Kernighan & Ritchies of the world) become obsolete really fast. Many Novels get bundled by my local farmer's market for a $1-3 a piece. And are you really going to resell a book on half.com or amazon for $9 or less and go to the bother of going to the post office to ship it and what not? It's not worth it for the time alone.
Convenience: Some book collections are worth good money. One of my friend is an antique dealer and his 1000s reference guides alone from the 1910s to the 1990s are all out of print and would bring money to the right collectors of their niche. But he uses them for work and because he's rather disorganized, they all randomly take up 3 rooms piled here and there and on book cases. If he had them scanned in on a computer, at least, he could at least look through his collection by keywords instead of spending hours flipping through books because he remembers taking a glimpse of some relevant item here or there years back. Which he often wastes a Saturday doing when he would rather be doing other things.
Your point about the physical nature of a book is valid, but I suspect generational. It's the same lament of those who like vinyl records vs CDs or now mp3s. There are definite up and downsides to both mediums, real and perceived, but the next generation will be more easy to take up the next big thing.
You'll be waiting 5 years at least. I'm probably getting an iliad DR1000SW or PlasticLogic's model next year because they finally got the screen size up to snuff.
The economic analysis in the summary at least is a bit shortsighted. You can save a little on newspaper subscriptions since they don't have to deliver to you or you don't have to waste gas getting one and there are a lot of good free (legally) books online to learn languages/programming/anything but don't want to sit on the computer for. Like this one:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/
or
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
When I sat down years ago to read those or other books on the computer, it just was a pain. I couldn't use my computer for other things as easily and the eyestrain of a backlighted screen all day. Years back, without a second monitor, it was kinda a pain to follow some programming examples and keep switching back and forth.
Add to that the convenience of having all your books in a memory card or single harddrive. It was a factor driving mp3 music players vs CDs and CDs are much easier to carry around than books.
What is wrong with the current set of books is this:
-screen size (recently solved with the iRex DR1000S - now they have models out big and small good for newspaper/technical_reading/textbooks vs fiction)
-screen refresh rate (too slow on all models)
-only 4 (16 iliad) shades right now
-klutzy software (Apple could exploit this market sooner or later)
-battery life in some models (e-Ink doesn't use any energy once screen is rendered - yet some manufacturers build these things to be recharged almost daily instead of weekly), turn the page and switch it off
-no color
For me, battery life and software and screen size is what I'm not going to compromise on, all others I'm flexible. It probably will be different for everyone. The potential benefits are tremendous though.
That thinking is limited. This isn't a 'newspaper' reader. It reads pretty much anything. What would it have been worth to have all your heavy schoolbooks in this instead of lugging around some heavy bag? And reference guides? I got a lot of free (legally) books off the web to learn computer languages, etc. The small ereaders are not useful for for such things (they are more fiction writing oriented), but this size screen works.
If you also figure Americans (for one) move every seven years - what would it be worth to just have everything on this device and a few memory cards rather than boxes and boxes of books - most left unread past the first chapter anyway statistically? (I'm the type to digitize everything - cds, movies, etc for such convenience).
The price will have to (and will anyway) come down for mass acceptance, but this technology is not mature enough for that stage yet anyway. It's still with the early adopters, most of whom of professionals with disposable income and gadget freaks.
What I wanted to add was that e-ink readers could be incredibly useful beyond the instant newspaper/book, library in your hand idea: especially if they would ever combine it with things something like a stylus version (doesn't exist) of the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen (released this year). The pen has few button, rather relying on 'special' paper that really just has some prearranded dots to orient the pen as well as some functions on the bottom of the sheet for the pen to do it's thing. Since that company also lets you print your own paper, this as an ereader stylus could be combined into something incredible useful. IMO, that would be the future of such things:
http://www.amazon.com/Livescribe-2GB-Pulse-Smartpen-APA-00002/dp/B001AAN4PW
That's not quite right, the iLiad DR1000S is on the market right now (and the wifi capable DR1000SW in soon) and they both have similiar sized screens (an A4 sized piece of paper sans normal margins). The difference is that these screens are traditional e-ink screens with glass (?) prone to cracking/breaking while Plastic Logic's is flexible.
There are other drawbacks to both. This is Plastic Logic's first device. 1st Generation devices can really suck, not to mention 1st one ever out of a company. iRex's pushed out previous ereaders (iliad) but they all suffer from a battery problem: as I understand it the CPU never really goes to "sleep" - draining the thing in a day. One of the point of e-ink was that it takes no energy once the display is rendered. So obviously this is a drawback. Also, since the battery is non-user changeable it will cost that much more to replace more frequently. They promised to fix it soon, but what are promises worth?
OTOH, iRex recently opensourced much of their software system with more soon to come. Which is a major plus. Also, it has a wacom enabled screen - allowing you to annotate your texts and take notes on it. The problem with all e-ink displays right now is that there will be lag from your writing and it being rendered.
In reality, we're in the opening stages of the e-ink revolution (much like cell phones in the 80's) and that means we won't have a truly GOOD device for many years. Kindle helped really kickstart it. Hopefully we will see color soon, although that is really one of the lower priority things considered.
IMHO, this is a niche that a competent software/hardware company (Apple) could really exploit much like they did in previous 'established' niches when the time comes. Just set up a book section in iTunes and they'd have half the market already.
tag. This isn't like paedophiles preying on targets, using the internet as the means of finding their victims in hopes of targeting them in real life.
This is the opposite. The bully already knows his victims, and uses the internet just as another avenue to further that bullying.
I don't know a definite answer, but attaching cyber to it seems nothing but a way to get people's fears up to pass stupid laws.
Half the people have under median IQs you mean.
Not average. For an extreme example, 9 people have 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 IQ respectively and #10 has 150. The average IQ in that room would be 105, and 9 out of 10 would have below average IQ.
Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.
Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.
I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years.
Why, as a consumer, can I not buy Windows for a similiar low price, or a low multiple? Why is it in the hundreds of $$$? Why are there over 6 versions of Vista now? Why not just 2?
Don't use wikipedia then. I use it about 50 times a day. I just contributed $100 toward it because it's that usefull to me. No static, "closed-soure" encyclopedia comes close for me for 'esoteric' topics.
on the blackberry that make it more prone to 'breaking'. I know on many of my gadgets, sometimes it's the mechanical things that are the first to go.
Although, I was going to suggest the iPhone gets better taken care of - perhaps not. It's just a $199 device to many people, that if they break it, just have to shell out that money and extend their contract with AT&T for a new one most likely.
I'm still wondering how they afford it. Was considering between a truly unlocked iPhone from Hong Kong or an iPod Touch for half the price. It's scary either way, and yet still cheaper than the ATT contract.
I'd like to add I like Aptera's approach of putting a small engine in an electrical car and letting it charge the batteries. Many vehicles only use a tiny fraction of their horsepower to maintain speed and the rest is for acceleration, so in an car driven by electrical motors - the gasoline recharging engines can be significantly smaller; 5-20hp (? - my civic has 140hp in comparison); probably just a little more than what's needed to maintain targetted top speed (or up-hill considerations).
And a gasoline or better, a diesel engine is plenty efficient already just for this general approach.