The article was stripped of all nuance and then injected with confusing bits. e.g.
>NoSQL will never die, but it will eventually get marginalized, like how Rails was marginalized by NoSQL
What? How was Rails marginalized by NoSQL?
Also, it's nice to see the whole BerkeleyDB-ish/key-value sector of the data storage world suddenly exploding with innovation. There's a lot of dogma on both sides of the NoSQL argument (and the name "NoSQL" doesn't help), but some of the many NoSQL tools look as though they'll be pretty useful. Cassandra and MongoDB especially. And big companies getting behind the growth of new tools is never a bad thing.
I guess that I'm a little bugged by the summary's wording since it makes HIV seem like an intelligent system that chooses to hide itself. Is that the case or has the latent HIV virus been found in bone marrow?
From the article, it seems as though HIV is able to infect cells in more areas of the body than previously thought, not that the virus has any particular strategy... But I suppose a headline that screams "The AIDS is coming! The AIDS is coming!" probably gets more reads...
I could focus on reducing mortality due to prescription drug side-effects and maybe get $5k? That's awesome, I can totally help out my fellow... what's that? I get $1M if I rock NetFlix's movie rating DB? Movie ratings here I come!
Actually, I guess music is a bit different since it has significant replay value, but...
The best possible movies are ones in which I feel interested and involved. I feel interested/involved in many games I play, so perhaps games can be viewed as non-interactive games (WTF is that). Should we be surprised the "interactive movies" [games] outsell "non-interactive movies" [movies]?
I liked the rumble feature of the PS2 controller. Cheesy, but it did provide for some interesting emotional effects (why something vibrating in my hand would make me feel like the car on the screen is in trouble is a mystery to me, but it worked). Why would Sony remove this feature? Cost? It seems that the tilt features on the controllers are a bit sensitive and tweaky, so perhaps rumble breaks tilt sensing.
The article summary doesn't make clear that the weapons are not going to be tested on *willing* US citizens (e.g. college students looking to make $100 for a few brief moments of pain). TFA talks about using the weapons for crowd control in the U.S.
Still think TFA has a good idea, but wanted to point out that difference.
Defensive manuever: if Microsoft has the patents, then Sun can't invent the same thing and prevent Microsoft from conducting its business. Patents don't generally yield revenue, but no one in their right mind will sue IBM for patent infringment! because it's a sure bet that IBM has tons of patents covering everything from your toilet paper to your processor architecture.
The biggest problem is that Tivo doesn't have any substantial competitive advantage...
A network of programming data? Media Center can pick that up and I'm sure that the data could be picked up off some net source pretty easily anyway.
A cute UI? My Sony PS2 has a cute, functional UI, so the UI could be replicated.
A killer patent portfolio? Probably a nice asset, but I wouldn't want to be the one to sue Sony or MS over it.
>1. Apple
Interesting, but Apple isn't exactly known for taking other peoples' technology and rebranding it Apple. Not Invented Here was Invented At Apple. Jeez, even when they adopt a standard, they rebrand it! (see Airport, Firewire?)
>2. Sony, Pioneer, or Toshiba
Shoulda done it years ago. Why didn't Philips acquire Tivo? Probably because they understood that Moore's law would make the hardware cheaper and the software cheaper, so why buy the cow when the milk is getting free-er.
>4. A non-Apple computer company, such as Dell or Gateway.
Probably not. Just as Walmart did to retailing, Dell has squeezed all of the fun and margin out of the computer business. There's no way that Gateway can go spend a bunch of speculative money when their margins are approaching 0%.
>5. A media company, such as Viacom or Virgin.
The media companies know that the cable and satellite broadcasters are jealously guarding their media and are opposing the ability of digital broadcast decode until the broadcasters can replicate the interesting services using set top boxes and central office media server. Go see how many add-in cards that decode digital cable exist for your PC... Europeans have them. The US doesn't.
>7. Microsoft
No way. I can't think of a great reason, but a little voice in my head keeps yelling "danger! anti-trust! danger! anti-trust!".
A friend of mine pointed out a case in which a pop-up/pop-under/pop-whatever redirected IE to a "legit" advertiser's site. No biggie. What was a problem was that the advertiser's site had been hacked and had some bit of malware on it, which installed bad stuff (bank info logger) on the user's computer.
Isn't that a bitch? Who's liable in this case? Mom's surfing the web, gets a pop-up, ho-hum, and winds up with her bank account drained because of spyware. Perhaps some civil litigation could be used against the pop-up providers or websites. If Ford and Firestone are sued when their vehicle/tire combination flips you upside down at 60MPH, why aren't websites and pop-up vendors sued when they lead IE users to spyware? (Yes, I understand that I pay for Ford/Firestone and don't pay for CNN... Still...)
>it hints that the actual implementation may be the same old slow PXE implementation
I think that a more significant limitation for the physical address space is the number of address lines allowed by the pinout/packaging of the chip. If Intel's Socket XYZ only supports 36 bits of memory addressing, I'm guessing that !surprise! the processor will only support 36 bits of memory. Probably not much to do with the PAE kludge.
>It makes you wonder why traditional colleges don't do this.
I gotta say that I woulda been a fricking mess if I had been released from college with a year of knowledge crammed into my ears... I had to learn about a lot more than algorithms, data structures and math...
I also think that it takes time to absorb the knowledge. I wouldn't have grokked electrical engineering in one year, even if you had really, really tried to get me to grok it in a year. Somethings take time to soak in.
>Perhaps they are simply milking their aging business model of enslaving >their grad students and treating undergrads like cattel instead of customers.
Dude, you are bitter. I enjoyed both my undergrad education and my first graduate degree. Both schools treated me well. Were they perfect? No. Did they have good intentions and did they try? Absolutely.
>aging business model
Err....com.boy, old business models are _not_ a Bad Thing. Sometimes they're old and due for replacement and sometimes they're old because they _work_. "Currency" and "monetary systems" are aging business models...
>Err..you do realize the shares that they are selling are non-voting shares right? Basically the >owners of these shares have no voting rights in the company.
Yes, yes, this is a nice little point and everyone knows it. So the IPO shares will have no effect on the actions of Google. Sure.
How about hypothetically: Google IPOs at $100, then somehow pisses off the market and the non-voting shares go to $10. Sure the $10 shareholders can't _vote_, but they can raise one hell of a stank, show up on talkshows, get news pieces written, etc. You think that management (or what passes for it at Google) would not listen to the non-voters in that case?
Er... They're probably getting stock because the worked for the company and the company gave them stock in order to get them to work, work, work. You may remember similar occurences around the turn of the century, eh?
--- Dregs
I don't think so. There are still plenty of reasons to use closed-source software. But Moore's Law applies both to hardware and to software, so it's relatively easy to duplicate someone else's software a few years later. We have OS duplicates of Word and Excel, but are lagging on the dupe for Outlook (give me shared calendaring...).
What O/S does do for software is the same thing that the government does for motorists/business: provide a common infrastructure upon which to operate your car/app. I'd be happy to pay the government to develop my roads and a trucking company to get my stuff on those roads; and I'd be happy to hire some O/S specialists to develop, maintain and contribute to my O/S infrastructure and IBM to maintain my J2EE infrastructure (yes, yes, JBoss, but you get my point).
Business models involving incredibly expensive software and absurdly expensive support contracts will grow and thrive... But only in high-end areas which O/S and commodity hardware cannot address yet. This is common, though:
for (; 1;) { low-end attacks high-end; the high-end moves to the higher-end; }
Also check out:
http://www.precisionlaserart.com - uses lasers to make small fractures in glass;
http://www.prometal.com - uses metal powder to create arbitrary 3D forms;
http://bathsheba.com - artist who uses the above forms;
Note: I've used PrecisionLaserArt for some artwork and had a good experience, so I'm biased...
(The United States places the greatest pressure on the environment, it takes 12.2 hectares of land to support each American citizen and 6.29 for each Briton.)
Most of that difference is due to the cost of dental and orthodontic work, though.
Looks to me as though CDs are priced about right: producers produce them and people do buy them. Everyone whines about the price of CDs, but then the population goes out and buys them. If the CDs were massively overpriced, then people wouldn't buy them, eh?
The MP3/WMA/Ogg phenomenon has certainly shifted the demand curve, though.
Slashdot Mirror
The article was stripped of all nuance and then injected with confusing bits. e.g.
>NoSQL will never die, but it will eventually get marginalized, like how Rails was marginalized by NoSQL
What? How was Rails marginalized by NoSQL?
Also, it's nice to see the whole BerkeleyDB-ish/key-value sector of the data storage world suddenly exploding with innovation. There's a lot of dogma on both sides of the NoSQL argument (and the name "NoSQL" doesn't help), but some of the many NoSQL tools look as though they'll be pretty useful. Cassandra and MongoDB especially. And big companies getting behind the growth of new tools is never a bad thing.
I guess that I'm a little bugged by the summary's wording since it makes HIV seem like an intelligent system that chooses to hide itself. Is that the case or has the latent HIV virus been found in bone marrow?
From the article, it seems as though HIV is able to infect cells in more areas of the body than previously thought, not that the virus has any particular strategy... But I suppose a headline that screams "The AIDS is coming! The AIDS is coming!" probably gets more reads...
>Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown)
Really? I fricking hate codenamed codenames...
I could focus on reducing mortality due to prescription drug side-effects and maybe get $5k? That's awesome, I can totally help out my fellow ... what's that? I get $1M if I rock NetFlix's movie rating DB? Movie ratings here I come!
Actually, I guess music is a bit different since it has significant replay value, but... The best possible movies are ones in which I feel interested and involved. I feel interested/involved in many games I play, so perhaps games can be viewed as non-interactive games (WTF is that). Should we be surprised the "interactive movies" [games] outsell "non-interactive movies" [movies]?
I liked the rumble feature of the PS2 controller. Cheesy, but it did provide for some interesting emotional effects (why something vibrating in my hand would make me feel like the car on the screen is in trouble is a mystery to me, but it worked). Why would Sony remove this feature? Cost? It seems that the tilt features on the controllers are a bit sensitive and tweaky, so perhaps rumble breaks tilt sensing.
-- Dregs?
I use a Small Business account with Yahoo with my own domain name. Anyone see how to get the Mail Beta working with a small business account?
- Dregs?
The article summary doesn't make clear that the weapons are not going to be tested on *willing* US citizens (e.g. college students looking to make $100 for a few brief moments of pain). TFA talks about using the weapons for crowd control in the U.S.
Still think TFA has a good idea, but wanted to point out that difference.
- Dregs?
Defensive manuever: if Microsoft has the patents, then Sun can't invent the same thing and prevent Microsoft from conducting its business. Patents don't generally yield revenue, but no one in their right mind will sue IBM for patent infringment! because it's a sure bet that IBM has tons of patents covering everything from your toilet paper to your processor architecture.
The biggest problem is that Tivo doesn't have any substantial competitive advantage...
A network of programming data? Media Center can pick that up and I'm sure that the data could be picked up off some net source pretty easily anyway.
A cute UI? My Sony PS2 has a cute, functional UI, so the UI could be replicated.
A killer patent portfolio? Probably a nice asset, but I wouldn't want to be the one to sue Sony or MS over it.
>1. Apple
Interesting, but Apple isn't exactly known for taking other peoples' technology and rebranding it Apple. Not Invented Here was Invented At Apple. Jeez, even when they adopt a standard, they rebrand it! (see Airport, Firewire?)
>2. Sony, Pioneer, or Toshiba
Shoulda done it years ago. Why didn't Philips acquire Tivo? Probably because they understood that Moore's law would make the hardware cheaper and the software cheaper, so why buy the cow when the milk is getting free-er.
>4. A non-Apple computer company, such as Dell or Gateway.
Probably not. Just as Walmart did to retailing, Dell has squeezed all of the fun and margin out of the computer business. There's no way that Gateway can go spend a bunch of speculative money when their margins are approaching 0%.
>5. A media company, such as Viacom or Virgin.
The media companies know that the cable and satellite broadcasters are jealously guarding their media and are opposing the ability of digital broadcast decode until the broadcasters can replicate the interesting services using set top boxes and central office media server. Go see how many add-in cards that decode digital cable exist for your PC... Europeans have them. The US doesn't.
>7. Microsoft
No way. I can't think of a great reason, but a little voice in my head keeps yelling "danger! anti-trust! danger! anti-trust!".
--- Dregs?
A friend of mine pointed out a case in which a pop-up/pop-under/pop-whatever redirected IE to a "legit" advertiser's site. No biggie. What was a problem was that the advertiser's site had been hacked and had some bit of malware on it, which installed bad stuff (bank info logger) on the user's computer.
Isn't that a bitch? Who's liable in this case? Mom's surfing the web, gets a pop-up, ho-hum, and winds up with her bank account drained because of spyware. Perhaps some civil litigation could be used against the pop-up providers or websites. If Ford and Firestone are sued when their vehicle/tire combination flips you upside down at 60MPH, why aren't websites and pop-up vendors sued when they lead IE users to spyware? (Yes, I understand that I pay for Ford/Firestone and don't pay for CNN... Still...)
--- Dregs
>it hints that the actual implementation may be the same old slow PXE implementation
I think that a more significant limitation for the physical address space is the number of address lines allowed by the pinout/packaging of the chip. If Intel's Socket XYZ only supports 36 bits of memory addressing, I'm guessing that !surprise! the processor will only support 36 bits of memory. Probably not much to do with the PAE kludge.
--- Dregs?
>It makes you wonder why traditional colleges don't do this.
.com.boy, old business models are _not_ a Bad Thing. Sometimes they're old and due for replacement and sometimes they're old because they _work_. "Currency" and "monetary systems" are aging business models...
I gotta say that I woulda been a fricking mess if I had been released from college with a year of knowledge crammed into my ears... I had to learn about a lot more than algorithms, data structures and math...
I also think that it takes time to absorb the knowledge. I wouldn't have grokked electrical engineering in one year, even if you had really, really tried to get me to grok it in a year. Somethings take time to soak in.
>Perhaps they are simply milking their aging business model of enslaving
>their grad students and treating undergrads like cattel instead of customers.
Dude, you are bitter. I enjoyed both my undergrad education and my first graduate degree. Both schools treated me well. Were they perfect? No. Did they have good intentions and did they try? Absolutely.
>aging business model
Err...
---Dregs
>Err..you do realize the shares that they are selling are non-voting shares right? Basically the
>owners of these shares have no voting rights in the company.
Yes, yes, this is a nice little point and everyone knows it. So the IPO shares will have no effect on the actions of Google. Sure.
How about hypothetically: Google IPOs at $100, then somehow pisses off the market and the non-voting shares go to $10. Sure the $10 shareholders can't _vote_, but they can raise one hell of a stank, show up on talkshows, get news pieces written, etc. You think that management (or what passes for it at Google) would not listen to the non-voters in that case?
---Dregs
Er... They're probably getting stock because the worked for the company and the company gave them stock in order to get them to work, work, work. You may remember similar occurences around the turn of the century, eh? --- Dregs
I don't think so. There are still plenty of reasons to use closed-source software. But Moore's Law applies both to hardware and to software, so it's relatively easy to duplicate someone else's software a few years later. We have OS duplicates of Word and Excel, but are lagging on the dupe for Outlook (give me shared calendaring...).
What O/S does do for software is the same thing that the government does for motorists/business: provide a common infrastructure upon which to operate your car/app. I'd be happy to pay the government to develop my roads and a trucking company to get my stuff on those roads; and I'd be happy to hire some O/S specialists to develop, maintain and contribute to my O/S infrastructure and IBM to maintain my J2EE infrastructure (yes, yes, JBoss, but you get my point).
Business models involving incredibly expensive software and absurdly expensive support contracts will grow and thrive... But only in high-end areas which O/S and commodity hardware cannot address yet. This is common, though:
--- Drink the dregsClever.
Also check out:
http://www.precisionlaserart.com - uses lasers to make small fractures in glass;
http://www.prometal.com - uses metal powder to create arbitrary 3D forms;
http://bathsheba.com - artist who uses the above forms;
Note: I've used PrecisionLaserArt for some artwork and had a good experience, so I'm biased...
Cool light emitting screen things? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
UWB? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
Super batteries? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
- Dregs
Most of that difference is due to the cost of dental and orthodontic work, though.
Looks to me as though CDs are priced about right: producers produce them and people do buy them. Everyone whines about the price of CDs, but then the population goes out and buys them. If the CDs were massively overpriced, then people wouldn't buy them, eh?
The MP3/WMA/Ogg phenomenon has certainly shifted the demand curve, though.