And someone will realize there's a market for Mac and Linux games. That isn't my point : I'm talking about mass market, AAA titles and where they will be sold, not indy games.
Too fucking bad. The publishers won't sell you that game. The publishers will offer a better value than before, anyway...the overwhelming majority of games sold cost about $60 and the typical gamer only plays them for 20-50 hours at most.
Most gamers will rather pay $1 an hour and nothing on the hardware and play any game NOW rather than $400-$1500 on hardware and $60 to start playing a game that might suck.
What market has taken off in the cell phone industry? Every single provider offers cheap upfront costs for the hardware (and costs you more later). The majority of people take that rather than the theoretically cheaper "pay $530 for the hardware, save money every month" that would be better.
The console makers will go away because by the time they start designing the generation of consoles after this one, they'll notice that game sales for current consoles are plummeting, in favor of cloud gaming. They won't risk billions of dollars throwing hardware into a sinking market. Publishers will also refuse to make new console games, because optimizing for a console's shitty hardware is a heck of a lot harder than making a game run smooth on the massive, beefy hardware with gobs of ram available in a cloud gaming data center.
Maybe. In my town, fiber to the curb is available, so the infrastructure's there. A LOT of the country can purchase 6mbps DSL, or cable service that is about that fast. The dsl DSLAMs could easily be upgraded to handle the kind of traffic that heavy use of cloud gaming would involve.
Not sure what you are saying about an MMO : even if the client is running on machines in a data center, each client session would need to know about all of the objects moving independently in the game space.
See, to make it work, it's gotta be prioritized like :
1. VoIP 2. cloud gaming 4. regular network gaming 5. Video chat 6. web pages, other small file size on demand content 7. steaming video 8. file sharing
And for your ISP to know what packet is what, it'll have to have agreements with the service providers for the services on this list so that it "knows" a packet sent to/from onlive's server block is probably cloud gaming, and a packet sent to/from google or facebook or yahoo is probably a web page, and a packet sent to/from youtube is streaming video, and a packet sent to skype is a VoIP chat, and a packet sent to an unkown IP must be file sharing.
You can't trust the client PC owned by the ISP's customers to label packets properly, since every malicious file sharing app or botnet spamming program would just put the highest priority packet code on it's communications.
I predict that cloud gaming services will utterly dominate all gaming. Within 5-10 years, virtually all new titles will be released exclusively for cloud gaming services, and will not be available at all otherwise. Consoles as we know them will become totally extinct : the next generation of consoles will be the last.
The reason is economics. It isn't hard to see the enormous forces that will push cloud gaming to domination.
1. All game publishers will be paid for every hour of game played. This increases their income, which will increase the supply of high quality games. This is because with cloud gaming, piracy is basically impossible, yet the forces that drive pirates are also mostly eliminated. You won't have to plunk down $60 to try out a game legally : you'll be able to play any game for $1 an hour or $40 or so a month.
2. Instead of there being 3 console platforms + PC, there will be just one platform : the PCs in the cloud gaming data centers. Most likely, the cloud gaming providers will soon release development kits that are a PC with the exact same hardware and OS image as they have running in their data centers. PCs are already the easiest platform to get a game running on, with the best dev tools. Now game publishers will be able to develop their games exclusively for this platform, with a fixed hardware base.
3. The overall costs of gaming will be lower. Instead of every gamer needing their own CPU + GPU, whether that be in a console box or a gaming PC, they'll just rent a portion of one from a central service. Even after collecting profits, cloud gaming providers will be able to provide gamers with gaming services for much annual lower costs than buying a gaming system and games.
4. The big criticisms in this article will be eliminated once there are more cloud gaming data centers, located all over the United States to put one close in terms of network switches to every ISP customer. (reducing latency to 30ms or so, enough to eliminate perceived lag) Also, there are some tricks with the mouse input that could eliminate the overshoot described in the article. (sync the mouse coordinates on the client with the server) The other big critism : inferior graphics quality : will be mostly eliminated with more bandwidth dedicated to the video stream. The author notes that the current beta client uses only about 1 megabit for the video. 5 megabits would greatly increase the image quality.
5. Next generation games that blow your mind graphically will now be practical. Right now, you can't develop and sell a game that requires cutting edge hardware to give photorealistic graphics. Consoles are years behind, and you can't write a PC game to require a new $2000 PC that only a few gamers have at any given time. With cloud gaming, however, that will be entirely practical : if you're willing to pay a little more per hour, you'll be able to enjoy Crysis 4 maxxed out with smooth as glass, uber realistic graphics.
6. While one form of lag is introduced with cloud gaming, it eliminates another. Since each game client is running in a data center with excellent internet connectivity, latency BETWEEN clients in a multiplayer game will be virtually eliminated.
7. The tech support nightmare of supporting games due to hardware problems is mostly eliminated. Games will also load far, far faster because the cloud gaming service can just switch your session to a PC that has already loaded the game.
8. Eventually, enough hardware to support online will be integrated into new TVs and blu-ray players, so basically anyone with a TV and a spare USB mouse/keyboard or USB gamepad will be able to enjoy PC games in their full glory.
9. The resurgence of mouse/keyboard using gamers will mean that PC game genres like RTS will make a big comeback.
And lots more reasons.
The reasons slowing down cloud gaming?
1. ISPs have to have a contract with the cloud gaming provider, and to use QoS to
Actually, that method has a couple of huge drawbacks.
Since the polarization is linear, if you tilt your head there will be a loss of the 3d effect and some major ghosting. So, to use such a display you have to always be sitting up with your head at 90 degrees exactly with respect to the bottom of the display.
Also, the polarization will be imperfect, and there will be distracting bleed over and ghosting no matter what.
Shutter glasses avoid these problems completely, although they do introduce a new one (flicker).
Still, the perceptible flicker can be completely eliminated once we move to OLED based displays, which are capable of MUCH faster refresh rates the LCDs. (think 500 hz or more)
Oh, I thought the various simulants that they make out there were completely fake. Didn't know they contained some real explosives, which is a good thing. Only tricky bit is that if you're using it to train a doggie, the dog might think real explosives were different cuz the dog didn't smell the binder, and the dog might give it a pass.
Why didn't they use blocks of plastic COATED with a thin layer of real explosives? Enough that any sort of sniffer should be able to detect them, but not enough to make a dangerous explosion.
Even 80g of explosives is a fair sized bang, is it not?
I wonder how good the security REALLY is on nuclear arms. It's entirely possible that there are holes as glaring as this one in the internal equipment used to control the launch of nuclear missiles.
Course, it is the ultimate in obscurity. No one is ever allowed to connect any kind of debugger or sniffer to the control systems in a missile silo. The plans of the system are a secret, and as I understand it many of the computers in there are very old, running obscure OSes (or no OS, just an assembly code loop) that no one has ever heard of, made custom for the project.
The original designers knew, but those guys might have worked on the project in the 70s or 80s, and many of them are probably dead or retired now.
No one is allowed physical access to any of the equipment either, with a "2 man rule" for anyone doing maintenance. I would suspect that the techs who work on the system aren't given detailed enough design documents to work out how it actually functions.
So, not sure if it's really a problem. Can't come up with ideas for attacking a system if you don't even know what the system is. Kind of like being told that someone is encrypting a message, but you don't know how they are going to do it, nor can intercept any of the communication.
Still, in a sci fi story I am working, a group of terrorists are able to get physical access to the equipment in a missile silo, and they are helped by an AI who can instantly figure out how to hack into a system if given access to the equipment.
Yep. The most logical conclusion that can be reached is that since there are NOT bunches of terrorists attacking our vulnerabilities, there are NOT very many international terrorists willing and able to attack the United States in the world. From the evidence, there are probably less than 100 people out of 6.5 billion who fit the description. If there were more, there would be more attacks, and some of them would be successful. Instead, there hasn't been a successful attack for many years.
The slashdot groupthink on this may be totally wrong.
See, the fact that the iphone is locked down means that it is difficult to conveniently duck out of paying for iphone software. If you want an app, you have to fork over a few bucks at the iTunes store. This in turn means that more developers get paid, which causes more people to put resources into developing for the iphone. That's why there are 100k apps already.
Further, Apple actually makes it pretty favorable to be a dev. Yes, you have to have your app approved, which is annoying (but stops people from selling an app on the store that is a pirated version of another app) However, in return for a small amount of risk and hassle, you get a huge chunk of the money spent on your app. Something like 60% of the revenues, am I right? No other publisher offers terms that favorable, in any industry. While there is an upfront cost to develop apps, it isn't much...a used Mac (or a Hackintosh) is a heck of a lot cheaper than a ps3 devkit.
Anyways, better apps mean more people buy iphones, which means more people buy apps, which means more...see how it is self perpetuating? This is one of the reasons that the competitors, even the ones backed by google, are so embarassingly far behind.
Most of the reason for this is that good software costs a LOT more to develop than hardware design. Hence the success of Apple (they put hundreds of millions into their software environment, and they started with a dev team of accomplished programmers who had worked on previous projects for Apple) and the growing success of Google Android. (while the Android isn't as good as the Apple product, it's a darn sight better than the chintzy products before it)
The 'netbooks' are shrinking on the low end to compete with smartphones and growing on the high end to compete with laptops. This is real competition at work : there's going to be a computing device ranging from pocket sized all the way up to a desktop with 30" screens.
The interesting bit is that all of these computing devices tend to be all-in one type machines that can take pictures and video, make calls, browse the web, play music, play games, GPS navigate, etc. More specialized devices that only play music (ipod) or GPS navigate (tom tom) or display email (blackberry) or let you write down notes (newton) or take pictures (compact digital camera) are rapidly becoming obsolete.
Every one of these devices, from the smart phone up to the monster desktop, is able to do it all.
On the bad side, the cell phone companies have a stranglehold on the wireless data these devices all need to function. Not only is there clear collusion and oligopoly pricing, but the companies tend to price things based upon arbitrary metrics rather than actual cost. If there was actual free market competition in the wireless industry, text messages would be almost free and downloading video data would cost a fortune. Yet you can get an unlimited data plan for $40-$70 while texting costs at least $20 for unlimited.
That doesn't make any sense on the face of it. Beings that have the power to tear apart planets aren't going to have a use for apes in the labor force.
Still would be easier to have a 2-dimension circuit with a fluid pathway on one or both sides. Stacking circuits does allow for a lot greater density...it's obviously what we'll eventually use...but the heat problem means that we won't be doing it with current materials for CPUs. (for memory chips it would work fine)
The Nexus one only really supports T-mobile. I did think about that...VoIP on a wireless link does sound pretty unreliable. There might be static, garbled communications, needing to speak loudly into the phone...even dropped calls. Then I thought "just like the kind of service I'm getting for ~$40/month through AT&T right now..."
At least with google voice, you'll get great reception when you are connected via wi-fi to a decent internet connection (like at home for sure). Probably get about the same quality at home as you'd get on a real landline. And you don't have to pay any sort of long distance charges, or worry about minutes. Plus, all your voicemail gets transcribed and you can read it right there in gmail. Sounds like a winner to me.
100% wrong. Advertising doesn't pay enough for google to be the Iluminati. No, what google does very well is it implements huge backend systems that are cheaper and more reliable than anyone else.
It does this by :
1. A custom (Linux based) OS and file system and failover system (by duplicating all data 3x)
2. custom, super-cheap hardware based on PCs
3. Hiring the smartest programmers it can possibly find, although it tends to pick people based upon educational achievement and not real world success.
The Nexus One will let you access google's wonderful backend systems while on the move. It'll be very cheap, and run very fast. +1 FTW.
So you can buy a Nexus One for $530 and pick up a data SIM for $29 a month. You get unlimited voice, unlimited SMS. I think the data SIM is capped at 5 gigs/month....which at 4 minutes/megabyte comes to thousands of 'minutes' a month. 5 gig is a little sparse for watching youtube videos, but more than adequate for finding information and checking maps.
2 year cost comes to $1,226. Iphone 3G two year cost is $1,975. Pretty substantial savings.
I would guess that google voice is/will be a ton more flexible than other voice providers...can probably do VoIP using wifi whenever you are near a hotspot. Can most likely auto-forward to a home VOIP system whenever you are at home or the phone is turned off. If you have wireless internet at home and at work (who doesn't?), that basically means unlimited everything whenever you are there.
Better display and better hardware than the iphone as well.
To be honest, this sounds like a winner. This smartphone can do many of the tasks of a real PC, yet the 2 year cost is about what you'd pay on the cheapest plan offered by a major wireless provider in the United States.
Would you kill your own parents? Even if they had experienced some neurological degeneration and weren't nearly as intelligent as you? I don't think strong AI would see us as ants.
Actually, the final state I imagine things being in is a series of rotating habitats, each with a different stage of earth's biosphere. There might be one where reconstructed dinosaurs and primordial forests have taken over, another with the goup we thing that life started from. There might also be man in different stages of development : maybe a cave-man habitat all the way up to the peak of our civilization. I think the AI actually would have a form of FTL communication...recently on slashdot you may have read that the latest theories of physics do allow this. (for AI, FTL communication is exactly as good as FTL travel, since if your whole being is just information, you can leap right through a communications link as if you really traveled there)
But who knows. I do hope to live to see the first crude AI bots...it would be very neat to chat with one.
Wow, really? Most people I talk to disagree, or have different views of the future.
Obviously, predicting the future is impossible, however, there's a few basic ideas :
1. It isn't impossible to recreate human intelligence using electronic circuitry, and it'll happen sooner or later. A recent developement is a PhD researcher noticed how the human brain is extremely noisy and neurons are actually fairly flakey and inconsistent, and he built a brain simulator using ASICs that is about 10,000 times more power efficient than current supercomputers. While the human brain has some incredibly complex structures, we can cheat in a lot of ways (our AIs will have MUCH better hardware and cleaner data input for one), and we think nature designed the whole thing completely blind.
2. Once it becomes clear that it IS possible to create AI, the forces pushing humans to develop it would be unstoppable. No law or U.N. resolution could stop the developement : any nation or group that had a working AI would also possess a weapon that would make nukes look like firecrackers. (because a working AI with good hardware would be able to run at around 10 million times the thinking speed of human beings, able to create new tech or weapons or control robots or hack into human programmed computers with ease)
3. Such AIs will need resources. Unless they have technology different from what we can imagine, they'll need to use solid matter in their nanomachines (well, very large machines that are built atom by atom). The energy to power all these state changes will mostly come from the sun. While it's possible that they could kill us to free up the matter in our bodies and biosphere, I have to hope that beings vastly smarter than us will have enough compassion or curiosity to preserve the race of primates that created them, as well as the rest of the biosphere. (the reason we'd be in rotating space habitats is that is a LOT more mass efficient than leaving the earth intact).
You have a point that this might only last for a while. Unless FTL communication is possible, there won't ever be an interstellar empire or network of AI civilizations. Matter here at Sol will always be limited resource, and the AIs might scan our brains and compact us down to thumbnail sized scraps of molecular circuitry or something in order to save on mass. (followed by data compression...no need to keep billions of human personalities up and running when they could sorta almagate us into a virtual museum exhibit of just a few 'everyman' human personalities)
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes. That would help massively. (no pun intended)
And someone will realize there's a market for Mac and Linux games. That isn't my point : I'm talking about mass market, AAA titles and where they will be sold, not indy games.
5-10 megabit x264 is not going to have much in the way of compression artifacts.
Too fucking bad. The publishers won't sell you that game. The publishers will offer a better value than before, anyway...the overwhelming majority of games sold cost about $60 and the typical gamer only plays them for 20-50 hours at most.
Most gamers will rather pay $1 an hour and nothing on the hardware and play any game NOW rather than $400-$1500 on hardware and $60 to start playing a game that might suck.
What market has taken off in the cell phone industry? Every single provider offers cheap upfront costs for the hardware (and costs you more later). The majority of people take that rather than the theoretically cheaper "pay $530 for the hardware, save money every month" that would be better.
The console makers will go away because by the time they start designing the generation of consoles after this one, they'll notice that game sales for current consoles are plummeting, in favor of cloud gaming. They won't risk billions of dollars throwing hardware into a sinking market. Publishers will also refuse to make new console games, because optimizing for a console's shitty hardware is a heck of a lot harder than making a game run smooth on the massive, beefy hardware with gobs of ram available in a cloud gaming data center.
Maybe. In my town, fiber to the curb is available, so the infrastructure's there. A LOT of the country can purchase 6mbps DSL, or cable service that is about that fast. The dsl DSLAMs could easily be upgraded to handle the kind of traffic that heavy use of cloud gaming would involve.
Not sure what you are saying about an MMO : even if the client is running on machines in a data center, each client session would need to know about all of the objects moving independently in the game space.
Well, ok.
See, to make it work, it's gotta be prioritized like :
1. VoIP
2. cloud gaming
4. regular network gaming
5. Video chat
6. web pages, other small file size on demand content
7. steaming video
8. file sharing
And for your ISP to know what packet is what, it'll have to have agreements with the service providers for the services on this list so that it "knows" a packet sent to/from onlive's server block is probably cloud gaming, and a packet sent to/from google or facebook or yahoo is probably a web page, and a packet sent to/from youtube is streaming video, and a packet sent to skype is a VoIP chat, and a packet sent to an unkown IP must be file sharing.
You can't trust the client PC owned by the ISP's customers to label packets properly, since every malicious file sharing app or botnet spamming program would just put the highest priority packet code on it's communications.
I predict that cloud gaming services will utterly dominate all gaming. Within 5-10 years, virtually all new titles will be released exclusively for cloud gaming services, and will not be available at all otherwise. Consoles as we know them will become totally extinct : the next generation of consoles will be the last.
The reason is economics. It isn't hard to see the enormous forces that will push cloud gaming to domination.
1. All game publishers will be paid for every hour of game played. This increases their income, which will increase the supply of high quality games. This is because with cloud gaming, piracy is basically impossible, yet the forces that drive pirates are also mostly eliminated. You won't have to plunk down $60 to try out a game legally : you'll be able to play any game for $1 an hour or $40 or so a month.
2. Instead of there being 3 console platforms + PC, there will be just one platform : the PCs in the cloud gaming data centers. Most likely, the cloud gaming providers will soon release development kits that are a PC with the exact same hardware and OS image as they have running in their data centers. PCs are already the easiest platform to get a game running on, with the best dev tools. Now game publishers will be able to develop their games exclusively for this platform, with a fixed hardware base.
3. The overall costs of gaming will be lower. Instead of every gamer needing their own CPU + GPU, whether that be in a console box or a gaming PC, they'll just rent a portion of one from a central service. Even after collecting profits, cloud gaming providers will be able to provide gamers with gaming services for much annual lower costs than buying a gaming system and games.
4. The big criticisms in this article will be eliminated once there are more cloud gaming data centers, located all over the United States to put one close in terms of network switches to every ISP customer. (reducing latency to 30ms or so, enough to eliminate perceived lag) Also, there are some tricks with the mouse input that could eliminate the overshoot described in the article. (sync the mouse coordinates on the client with the server) The other big critism : inferior graphics quality : will be mostly eliminated with more bandwidth dedicated to the video stream. The author notes that the current beta client uses only about 1 megabit for the video. 5 megabits would greatly increase the image quality.
5. Next generation games that blow your mind graphically will now be practical. Right now, you can't develop and sell a game that requires cutting edge hardware to give photorealistic graphics. Consoles are years behind, and you can't write a PC game to require a new $2000 PC that only a few gamers have at any given time. With cloud gaming, however, that will be entirely practical : if you're willing to pay a little more per hour, you'll be able to enjoy Crysis 4 maxxed out with smooth as glass, uber realistic graphics.
6. While one form of lag is introduced with cloud gaming, it eliminates another. Since each game client is running in a data center with excellent internet connectivity, latency BETWEEN clients in a multiplayer game will be virtually eliminated.
7. The tech support nightmare of supporting games due to hardware problems is mostly eliminated. Games will also load far, far faster because the cloud gaming service can just switch your session to a PC that has already loaded the game.
8. Eventually, enough hardware to support online will be integrated into new TVs and blu-ray players, so basically anyone with a TV and a spare USB mouse/keyboard or USB gamepad will be able to enjoy PC games in their full glory.
9. The resurgence of mouse/keyboard using gamers will mean that PC game genres like RTS will make a big comeback.
And lots more reasons.
The reasons slowing down cloud gaming?
1. ISPs have to have a contract with the cloud gaming provider, and to use QoS to
Actually, that method has a couple of huge drawbacks.
Since the polarization is linear, if you tilt your head there will be a loss of the 3d effect and some major ghosting. So, to use such a display you have to always be sitting up with your head at 90 degrees exactly with respect to the bottom of the display.
Also, the polarization will be imperfect, and there will be distracting bleed over and ghosting no matter what.
Shutter glasses avoid these problems completely, although they do introduce a new one (flicker).
Still, the perceptible flicker can be completely eliminated once we move to OLED based displays, which are capable of MUCH faster refresh rates the LCDs. (think 500 hz or more)
Oh, I thought the various simulants that they make out there were completely fake. Didn't know they contained some real explosives, which is a good thing. Only tricky bit is that if you're using it to train a doggie, the dog might think real explosives were different cuz the dog didn't smell the binder, and the dog might give it a pass.
That won't crash the plane, or kill more than one person though.
Why didn't they use blocks of plastic COATED with a thin layer of real explosives? Enough that any sort of sniffer should be able to detect them, but not enough to make a dangerous explosion.
Even 80g of explosives is a fair sized bang, is it not?
I wonder how good the security REALLY is on nuclear arms. It's entirely possible that there are holes as glaring as this one in the internal equipment used to control the launch of nuclear missiles.
Course, it is the ultimate in obscurity. No one is ever allowed to connect any kind of debugger or sniffer to the control systems in a missile silo. The plans of the system are a secret, and as I understand it many of the computers in there are very old, running obscure OSes (or no OS, just an assembly code loop) that no one has ever heard of, made custom for the project.
The original designers knew, but those guys might have worked on the project in the 70s or 80s, and many of them are probably dead or retired now.
No one is allowed physical access to any of the equipment either, with a "2 man rule" for anyone doing maintenance. I would suspect that the techs who work on the system aren't given detailed enough design documents to work out how it actually functions.
So, not sure if it's really a problem. Can't come up with ideas for attacking a system if you don't even know what the system is. Kind of like being told that someone is encrypting a message, but you don't know how they are going to do it, nor can intercept any of the communication.
Still, in a sci fi story I am working, a group of terrorists are able to get physical access to the equipment in a missile silo, and they are helped by an AI who can instantly figure out how to hack into a system if given access to the equipment.
Yep. The most logical conclusion that can be reached is that since there are NOT bunches of terrorists attacking our vulnerabilities, there are NOT very many international terrorists willing and able to attack the United States in the world. From the evidence, there are probably less than 100 people out of 6.5 billion who fit the description. If there were more, there would be more attacks, and some of them would be successful. Instead, there hasn't been a successful attack for many years.
The slashdot groupthink on this may be totally wrong.
See, the fact that the iphone is locked down means that it is difficult to conveniently duck out of paying for iphone software. If you want an app, you have to fork over a few bucks at the iTunes store. This in turn means that more developers get paid, which causes more people to put resources into developing for the iphone. That's why there are 100k apps already.
Further, Apple actually makes it pretty favorable to be a dev. Yes, you have to have your app approved, which is annoying (but stops people from selling an app on the store that is a pirated version of another app) However, in return for a small amount of risk and hassle, you get a huge chunk of the money spent on your app. Something like 60% of the revenues, am I right? No other publisher offers terms that favorable, in any industry. While there is an upfront cost to develop apps, it isn't much...a used Mac (or a Hackintosh) is a heck of a lot cheaper than a ps3 devkit.
Anyways, better apps mean more people buy iphones, which means more people buy apps, which means more...see how it is self perpetuating? This is one of the reasons that the competitors, even the ones backed by google, are so embarassingly far behind.
Most of the reason for this is that good software costs a LOT more to develop than hardware design. Hence the success of Apple (they put hundreds of millions into their software environment, and they started with a dev team of accomplished programmers who had worked on previous projects for Apple) and the growing success of Google Android. (while the Android isn't as good as the Apple product, it's a darn sight better than the chintzy products before it)
The 'netbooks' are shrinking on the low end to compete with smartphones and growing on the high end to compete with laptops. This is real competition at work : there's going to be a computing device ranging from pocket sized all the way up to a desktop with 30" screens.
The interesting bit is that all of these computing devices tend to be all-in one type machines that can take pictures and video, make calls, browse the web, play music, play games, GPS navigate, etc. More specialized devices that only play music (ipod) or GPS navigate (tom tom) or display email (blackberry) or let you write down notes (newton) or take pictures (compact digital camera) are rapidly becoming obsolete.
Every one of these devices, from the smart phone up to the monster desktop, is able to do it all.
On the bad side, the cell phone companies have a stranglehold on the wireless data these devices all need to function. Not only is there clear collusion and oligopoly pricing, but the companies tend to price things based upon arbitrary metrics rather than actual cost. If there was actual free market competition in the wireless industry, text messages would be almost free and downloading video data would cost a fortune. Yet you can get an unlimited data plan for $40-$70 while texting costs at least $20 for unlimited.
That doesn't make any sense on the face of it. Beings that have the power to tear apart planets aren't going to have a use for apes in the labor force.
Well, you can do text/mms via google voice, as well as voice, as well as data.
Still would be easier to have a 2-dimension circuit with a fluid pathway on one or both sides. Stacking circuits does allow for a lot greater density...it's obviously what we'll eventually use...but the heat problem means that we won't be doing it with current materials for CPUs. (for memory chips it would work fine)
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/06/iphone-3g-whats-in-a-two-year-price.ars
That's where I got the 2 year price of an iphone.
The Nexus one only really supports T-mobile. I did think about that...VoIP on a wireless link does sound pretty unreliable. There might be static, garbled communications, needing to speak loudly into the phone...even dropped calls. Then I thought "just like the kind of service I'm getting for ~$40/month through AT&T right now..."
At least with google voice, you'll get great reception when you are connected via wi-fi to a decent internet connection (like at home for sure). Probably get about the same quality at home as you'd get on a real landline. And you don't have to pay any sort of long distance charges, or worry about minutes. Plus, all your voicemail gets transcribed and you can read it right there in gmail. Sounds like a winner to me.
100% wrong. Advertising doesn't pay enough for google to be the Iluminati. No, what google does very well is it implements huge backend systems that are cheaper and more reliable than anyone else.
It does this by :
1. A custom (Linux based) OS and file system and failover system (by duplicating all data 3x)
2. custom, super-cheap hardware based on PCs
3. Hiring the smartest programmers it can possibly find, although it tends to pick people based upon educational achievement and not real world success.
The Nexus One will let you access google's wonderful backend systems while on the move. It'll be very cheap, and run very fast. +1 FTW.
So you can buy a Nexus One for $530 and pick up a data SIM for $29 a month. You get unlimited voice, unlimited SMS. I think the data SIM is capped at 5 gigs/month....which at 4 minutes/megabyte comes to thousands of 'minutes' a month. 5 gig is a little sparse for watching youtube videos, but more than adequate for finding information and checking maps.
2 year cost comes to $1,226. Iphone 3G two year cost is $1,975. Pretty substantial savings.
I would guess that google voice is/will be a ton more flexible than other voice providers...can probably do VoIP using wifi whenever you are near a hotspot. Can most likely auto-forward to a home VOIP system whenever you are at home or the phone is turned off. If you have wireless internet at home and at work (who doesn't?), that basically means unlimited everything whenever you are there.
Better display and better hardware than the iphone as well.
To be honest, this sounds like a winner. This smartphone can do many of the tasks of a real PC, yet the 2 year cost is about what you'd pay on the cheapest plan offered by a major wireless provider in the United States.
Would you kill your own parents? Even if they had experienced some neurological degeneration and weren't nearly as intelligent as you? I don't think strong AI would see us as ants.
Actually, the final state I imagine things being in is a series of rotating habitats, each with a different stage of earth's biosphere. There might be one where reconstructed dinosaurs and primordial forests have taken over, another with the goup we thing that life started from. There might also be man in different stages of development : maybe a cave-man habitat all the way up to the peak of our civilization. I think the AI actually would have a form of FTL communication...recently on slashdot you may have read that the latest theories of physics do allow this. (for AI, FTL communication is exactly as good as FTL travel, since if your whole being is just information, you can leap right through a communications link as if you really traveled there)
But who knows. I do hope to live to see the first crude AI bots...it would be very neat to chat with one.
Wow, really? Most people I talk to disagree, or have different views of the future.
Obviously, predicting the future is impossible, however, there's a few basic ideas :
1. It isn't impossible to recreate human intelligence using electronic circuitry, and it'll happen sooner or later. A recent developement is a PhD researcher noticed how the human brain is extremely noisy and neurons are actually fairly flakey and inconsistent, and he built a brain simulator using ASICs that is about 10,000 times more power efficient than current supercomputers. While the human brain has some incredibly complex structures, we can cheat in a lot of ways (our AIs will have MUCH better hardware and cleaner data input for one), and we think nature designed the whole thing completely blind.
2. Once it becomes clear that it IS possible to create AI, the forces pushing humans to develop it would be unstoppable. No law or U.N. resolution could stop the developement : any nation or group that had a working AI would also possess a weapon that would make nukes look like firecrackers. (because a working AI with good hardware would be able to run at around 10 million times the thinking speed of human beings, able to create new tech or weapons or control robots or hack into human programmed computers with ease)
3. Such AIs will need resources. Unless they have technology different from what we can imagine, they'll need to use solid matter in their nanomachines (well, very large machines that are built atom by atom). The energy to power all these state changes will mostly come from the sun. While it's possible that they could kill us to free up the matter in our bodies and biosphere, I have to hope that beings vastly smarter than us will have enough compassion or curiosity to preserve the race of primates that created them, as well as the rest of the biosphere. (the reason we'd be in rotating space habitats is that is a LOT more mass efficient than leaving the earth intact).
You have a point that this might only last for a while. Unless FTL communication is possible, there won't ever be an interstellar empire or network of AI civilizations. Matter here at Sol will always be limited resource, and the AIs might scan our brains and compact us down to thumbnail sized scraps of molecular circuitry or something in order to save on mass. (followed by data compression...no need to keep billions of human personalities up and running when they could sorta almagate us into a virtual museum exhibit of just a few 'everyman' human personalities)