Yes, I agree that "digital" cable is simply AD/DA'ed standard tv. And that currently the only "true" digital end-to-end broadcast we have here is through HDTV. I also wasn't aware that you were referring to HDTV over cable, of which I have no idea of the prevelance (only that TimeWarner here doesn't offer it), so I acquiesce to your knowledge here;)
Just wanted to make sure that you're points were clear.
Whoa, hold your horses there. HDTV is NOT simply "broadcasting digital signals". HDTV is a standard (in the US) that encompasses many aspects of digital media including the format of the content, the specs for displays, the format for transmission, etc. HDTV does not necessarily imply digital (though it does here in the states, but not so in countries such as Japan which use(d) an analog standard). The resolution of a digital signal is not necessarily the same as the analog representation, since in the case of most digital cable systems and digital satallite (e.g. DirecTV), they use the MPEG1 standard which has a fixed resolution.
Also, HDTV signals are actually available in a great many regions, esp in large markets. Now the amount of content is fairly small, but it is there (e.g. CBS broadcasts in HDTV in many markets now).
Thats right, they are exiting the "hard drive" market. The cube is not a hard drive, it is an entire storage server. Two completely different things (like Intel getting out of the cpu business but still continuing to sell oem motherboards)
I'm not so sure here. Remember that the number one area that AMD trails Intel is in clock speed. Hey sound familiar, that is the exact same problem that Mot is having, trying to convince people that clock speed is not the end-all be-all of performance.
Also, keep in mind that AMD has been in the x86 market for a great many years now and have much experience with the architecture. They'd be coming into the PPC cold (barring any behind the scenes development that may have occured). Their only experience with RISC was the ill fated 29000 (which they quickly dropped the general purpose cpu market and focused on the embedded market). Not exactly a strong track record there (though AMD has done quite well in that market with the 29K, at least they were doing quite well).
And thirdly, there already is a second source for PPC chips, and that's IBM. As a matter of fact, one contenteous point between IBM and Mot was over AltiVec, IBM wanted to focus on higher clock rates, whereas Mot wanted to accelerate certain operations. Funny how Apple still does not use IBM designed (not necessarily fabbed) PPC's.
Pull a M$ and just come out and "embrace" AMD's 64bit technology. The first family of chips will be directly compatable, but then starting with the next wave, they slowly start introducing Intel Only (tm) features and once again force AMD to play catch up. How many people believe that Intel will play in the sandbox with AMD's shovel for a second longer than they have to.
Microsoft will start shipping xbox's with every copy of Windoze sold and claim that it is an integral part of the operating system and that it is to the users benefit to have xbox functionality be a part of the OS. A bunch of states will whine about it, but when push comes to shove, they'll "force" M$ to donate 1 million xbox's to schools ensuring a bountiful supply of users in need of software (which actually does show a nice profit).
Also, M$ will announce that the next version of xbox will use their new operating system called Unix# (that's Unix Sharp, not Unix Pound, or Unix Waffle, or Unix Tic-Tac-Toe, or Unix Number). Unix# will be just like Unix, but much better for end users and developers as it will make their lives much easier. Differences include forcing all shared libraries to have the.dll extension, changing the path seperator to the backslash, and creating home, professional, server, advanced server, way super duper advanced server, and ludicrous speed server versions of the OS (though through some packaging magic, all versions of the OS will ship on a single cd).
In the meantime, Bill Gates, who is personally funding xbox from his personal "play" account, is forced, due to weak sales, to postpone the purchase of the country of Belize until the next fiscal quarter.
After all, aren't I already restricted in business as far as naming my company is concerned? I can't call myself binaryDigit, Inc. if I am not offically incorporated (or LLC, Corp, etc). There's already a precident set for control of business names (and after all, isn't inc, corp, llc very similar to tld's in the "real" world").
Not saying I agree or disagree with the legislation (though I think they'll never be able to reasonably enforce this). Just seems like domain names are similar to dba's.
In other words, "we aint making squat from these drives". Face it, regardless of how much innovation IBM has, the drive market is VERY price sensitive. Most people are not willing to pay much, if any, premium for "fancy" features. Even performance gets a short shrift here as the average consumer doesn't even know about 5400rpm vs 7200rpm, they just want that 60 gigger thats $49.99.
Now what's really interesting is the article mentioning their battles against EMC. The money is in the storage systems market, not the drive market. I'm guessing that IBM wanted to get out of the commodity drive market to focus on the storage subsystems market, with Hitachi being a good source for the drives themselves now. Though I have to admit that it is sad to see a pioneer in the market leave it. Doesn't mean that they still can't bring innovations to that segment though.
Here's a thought. Currently voip services can be priced relatively cheaply. The question is, given rising demand, which would increase the voip providers expense (i.e. bandwitdth), can a provider maintain a low fee for usage? This issue becomes even more acute if users take advantage of the "unlimited" usage and actually start talking on the phone for long periods of time (i.e. if voip takes off with the teenage girl crowd, are these voip providers screwed?).
Given that, will voip pricing have to increase to make up the slack? If isp's (like RR) start metering their service, does that place extra burden on the voip providers? Also, given that email, IM, etc have taken over some of the roles of communication, is this really a cost effective form of communication ($/bit is pretty expensive for voip vs say email). Though obviously voice wins out over email for the personal touch.
For me personally, this is a non-issue. I have RR, but we use our land lines very infrequently. Both my wife and I work, so many calls get made from the office. And most other calls happen on the cell phone. So we only pay for the cheapest local line, which is way cheaper than $20/month. I guess if we made mucho long distance calls, then this might be an issue.
... even better, defaced. A group has made giant stickers saying, "I AM UGLY LITTER" and pasted them over these "work from home/lose weight now" things.
Uh, how is this better from the standpoint of visual litter. How does defacing something that's defacing something make things any better than the original defacing? If they're going to take the time to get out of their vehicles and paste a sticker on the sign, they could just as well remove the sign, which (in theory) would be helping to solve the problem vs simply adding to it.
Chewie: grunt, grunt, roar, roar, snarl (translation: do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese on Endor?)
Han: they don't call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
Chewie: roar, grunt, grunt, roar (no man, they got the metric system, they wouldn't know what the f*ck a quarter pounder is)
Han: then what do they call it?
Chewbaca: roar, roar, howl (a Royale With Cheese)
Han: "A Royale With Cheese"!, what do they call a Big Mac?
Chewie: grunt, roar, snarl, snarl, grunt, grunt, roar, snarl (a BigMac is a BigMac, but they call it "Le Big Mac"
Han: "Le Big Mac", hahaha. What do they call a Whopper?
Chewbaca: howl, howl, snarl, roar (I don't know, the Empire blew up the Burger King)
Scene: Princess Leia on the dusty floor, her shirt open revealing a lacy green bra, she's not breathing.
Yoda: Look, you brought her here, and that means that you're giving her the shot. The day that I bring an OD-ing princess over to your cave, then I'll give her the shot.
Lando: bring out the gimp
Bobafet: but the gimps sleeping
Lando: Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then
Darth: Hand me my wallet
Leia: Which one is it?
Darth: That one that says "bad motherf*cker on it"!
ObiWan: Now let me ask you a question, Luke. When you drove in here, did you notice a sign out in front that said, "Dead droid storage"?
Luke: ObiWan...
ObiWan: Answer the question! Did you see a sign out in front of my house that said "Dead droid storage"?
Luke: Naw man, I didn't.
ObiWan: You know why you didn't see that sign?
Luke: Why?
ObiWan: 'Cause storin' dead droids ain't my fuckin' business!
forget all that, how about whatever the probe itself is made out of. Is fibreglass/aluminum/carbon fibre a naturally occuring substance in the target environment. And we haven't even begun to talk about micro contaminants on the surface of the vessel (dust, spores, oils from the fingers of the last guy to work on it, etc). Let's face it, ANY type of active investigation (vs passive) WILL contaminate to a degree that which you are investigating (observe my careful avoidance of the word "probe" in the last sentence;)
Remember that with the original Playstation, Sony started with 0 market share and went on to dominate. This was in the face of the Saturn and N64, two players (though not necessarily the consoles) who up to that point, owned the market to themselves. Sony's and M$ ramp ups are similar in that they both started with nothing and used their name to push into the market. PS2 might have had the advantage of good timing, but M$ has the advantage of a very receptive marketplace (not to mention some seriously deep pockets).
If you were to replace "Playstation 2" with "Windows", and replace "XBox" with "Linux", this thread would have 1200 comments all stating how just because Windows sells more doesn't mean it's better
Uh, no we wouldn't. You can't compare the two. First and foremost, almost no one would claim that the PS2 is "better". Most people acknowlege that the xbox has a leg up hardware wise. Plus, Linux isn't being developed by a multi-billion dollar company that has monopolistic tendencies.
Fact is, in this war there is no "underdog". This a battle of two t-rex's. Two companies that know how to use their muscle to accomplish their respective goals. PUUULEEZZZE don't use the Windoze/Linux analogy here, it's a slap in the face of Linux folk everywhere (not to mention Sony).
An IBM/Sun merger just doesn't make any sense. IBM has a successful Unix division using a completely different CPU and completely different OS. If Solaris/Sparc had significant advantages OR disadvantages to AIX/Power, then maybe. Don't forget that IBM is absolutely notorious for not likeing one division canabalizing the sales from another. Heck, that's one of the factors that led to the clone market and IBM's unwillingness to innovate in the pc arena for years. So what are they going to do if then acquire Sun. Which platform do you push? What do you say to customers who are trying to buy a "IBM" solution? Nope, just a big mess.
One could also imagine scenerios where Sun customers would jump ship, since Sun has long been viewed as the anti-IBM (young and spritely vs old and lethargic). If IBM bought Sun, how many potential Sun people would look elsewhere (read PC's w/ Windoze/Linux) specifically because they DON'T want to tie themselves to IBM.
The Compaq/DEC merger was fine since Compaq for the most part didn't play in DEC's sandbox. The HP/Compaq merger has a chance (as far as Unix goes) since PA/RISC is moribund and so is Alpha. No such situation here though.
Also, one would have to imagine that the govt would have a VERY close look at any such merger, since the combined companies would own over half the Unix market and the feds are always on IBM's *ss about any type of monopolistic activities.
Lagging far behind. Uh I think not. The big three (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX) are damn near head to head afa market share goes. Plus AIX has mucho respect outside the scientific community. It's regarded as a stable and performant OS. The biggest rub against AIX is how it's non "standard" about damn near everything.
IBM acquiring Sun just doesn't make any sense (see my main post).
They could always start charging like the cellular folks. A tiered structure that increases the fixed payment portion while decreaseing the variable portion. Kinda like: $29.95 for 5GB/mo $1MB thereafter, $39.95 for 10GB/mo $.50MB thereafter, etc. Personally I think this would suck (complex and confusing, just the way they like it), but you can easily see it going this way.
The way some people think around here, we should all pay a flat rate for gas per month. Hey, now that's an idea....
The obvious solution to this issue (at least for legit sites) is to simply boycott any sites that use this technology. Boycott and email the site to let them know exactly why you're boycotting. If weather.com's hit count goes from 11.6 million to 2.4 million in a month after they unleash this "technology", then you better believe that they'll yank that thing so fast that you'll be able to hear the "wooosh". Enough people do this and enough sites react, and this abomination will go back to the rat hole from whence it came.
That said, I unfortunately can't see enough people doing this to make a difference. I hope that people will stand up and make a difference, but that typically is rare. We do have a voice, we just have to be willing to use it.
In order for pens to be useful the whole UI will need to change
Agreed, but this was also attempted back in the early days of pen computing. As an example, MagicCap was specifically designed to be pen centric allowing you to do things such as editing and navigating via gestures. It worked, but was still cumbersome (though I'm sure one could get very proficient with time). Perhaps a very radical break is required?
One thing to remeber is that most Americans who go to school learn to use a pen before they learn to type
True, but that doesn't mean that typing is a "good" way to input data into a device. Keep in mind that writing developed for a specific family of mediums (using a marking device upon some media) and that it doesn't necessarily make it an efficient solution for these types of tasks.
Man, this pen thing just keeps coming back. Does anyone remember back in the late 80's early 90's when pen computing was all the rage. PDA's were new (and large!) and everyone was going to chuck their keyboards from the tallest heights once they experience the joys of pen input. Didn't come true then, won't come true now.
Pen input is fine for certain specific applications (mobile being the obvious), but as a general purpose input device, it sucks.
Same goes for voice, it's fine in specific situations, but as a general purpose input device it is severly lacking (can you imagine an office full of people talking to their computers, ugh).
It's amazing that we haven't been able to figure out a good alternative to the ubiquitous keyboard. Maybe it's one of those inventions that just happen to hit the nail on the head (not that there can't be improvemnts to the basic keyboard, but the general concept).
I guess this also means, no more masturbating into the toilet
Esp. if the wife is not amused by such activity and decides to reprogram the laser. Could be a 21st century Lorena Bobbit kinda thing. At least the laser would also cauterize the wound, esp helpful since there would most likely be, uh, a fair bit of blood, uh down there, oh never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, science may not have caused many wars, but how many people has science killed in wars?
Yes, I agree that "digital" cable is simply AD/DA'ed standard tv. And that currently the only "true" digital end-to-end broadcast we have here is through HDTV. I also wasn't aware that you were referring to HDTV over cable, of which I have no idea of the prevelance (only that TimeWarner here doesn't offer it), so I acquiesce to your knowledge here ;)
Just wanted to make sure that you're points were clear.
Whoa, hold your horses there. HDTV is NOT simply "broadcasting digital signals". HDTV is a standard (in the US) that encompasses many aspects of digital media including the format of the content, the specs for displays, the format for transmission, etc. HDTV does not necessarily imply digital (though it does here in the states, but not so in countries such as Japan which use(d) an analog standard). The resolution of a digital signal is not necessarily the same as the analog representation, since in the case of most digital cable systems and digital satallite (e.g. DirecTV), they use the MPEG1 standard which has a fixed resolution.
Also, HDTV signals are actually available in a great many regions, esp in large markets. Now the amount of content is fairly small, but it is there (e.g. CBS broadcasts in HDTV in many markets now).
Thats right, they are exiting the "hard drive" market. The cube is not a hard drive, it is an entire storage server. Two completely different things (like Intel getting out of the cpu business but still continuing to sell oem motherboards)
I'm not so sure here. Remember that the number one area that AMD trails Intel is in clock speed. Hey sound familiar, that is the exact same problem that Mot is having, trying to convince people that clock speed is not the end-all be-all of performance.
Also, keep in mind that AMD has been in the x86 market for a great many years now and have much experience with the architecture. They'd be coming into the PPC cold (barring any behind the scenes development that may have occured). Their only experience with RISC was the ill fated 29000 (which they quickly dropped the general purpose cpu market and focused on the embedded market). Not exactly a strong track record there (though AMD has done quite well in that market with the 29K, at least they were doing quite well).
And thirdly, there already is a second source for PPC chips, and that's IBM. As a matter of fact, one contenteous point between IBM and Mot was over AltiVec, IBM wanted to focus on higher clock rates, whereas Mot wanted to accelerate certain operations. Funny how Apple still does not use IBM designed (not necessarily fabbed) PPC's.
Pull a M$ and just come out and "embrace" AMD's 64bit technology. The first family of chips will be directly compatable, but then starting with the next wave, they slowly start introducing Intel Only (tm) features and once again force AMD to play catch up. How many people believe that Intel will play in the sandbox with AMD's shovel for a second longer than they have to.
Microsoft will start shipping xbox's with every copy of Windoze sold and claim that it is an integral part of the operating system and that it is to the users benefit to have xbox functionality be a part of the OS. A bunch of states will whine about it, but when push comes to shove, they'll "force" M$ to donate 1 million xbox's to schools ensuring a bountiful supply of users in need of software (which actually does show a nice profit).
.dll extension, changing the path seperator to the backslash, and creating home, professional, server, advanced server, way super duper advanced server, and ludicrous speed server versions of the OS (though through some packaging magic, all versions of the OS will ship on a single cd).
Also, M$ will announce that the next version of xbox will use their new operating system called Unix# (that's Unix Sharp, not Unix Pound, or Unix Waffle, or Unix Tic-Tac-Toe, or Unix Number). Unix# will be just like Unix, but much better for end users and developers as it will make their lives much easier. Differences include forcing all shared libraries to have the
In the meantime, Bill Gates, who is personally funding xbox from his personal "play" account, is forced, due to weak sales, to postpone the purchase of the country of Belize until the next fiscal quarter.
stay awake for days at a time by sheer will alone! We don't need no stinkin pills.
After all, aren't I already restricted in business as far as naming my company is concerned? I can't call myself binaryDigit, Inc. if I am not offically incorporated (or LLC, Corp, etc). There's already a precident set for control of business names (and after all, isn't inc, corp, llc very similar to tld's in the "real" world").
Not saying I agree or disagree with the legislation (though I think they'll never be able to reasonably enforce this). Just seems like domain names are similar to dba's.
Remember back in the old days when isp's ruled with an iron fist and you had to prove that you were a non-profit or network to get those tlds?
Me thinks you miss the point.
the market has become too competitive
In other words, "we aint making squat from these drives". Face it, regardless of how much innovation IBM has, the drive market is VERY price sensitive. Most people are not willing to pay much, if any, premium for "fancy" features. Even performance gets a short shrift here as the average consumer doesn't even know about 5400rpm vs 7200rpm, they just want that 60 gigger thats $49.99.
Now what's really interesting is the article mentioning their battles against EMC. The money is in the storage systems market, not the drive market. I'm guessing that IBM wanted to get out of the commodity drive market to focus on the storage subsystems market, with Hitachi being a good source for the drives themselves now. Though I have to admit that it is sad to see a pioneer in the market leave it. Doesn't mean that they still can't bring innovations to that segment though.
Here's a thought. Currently voip services can be priced relatively cheaply. The question is, given rising demand, which would increase the voip providers expense (i.e. bandwitdth), can a provider maintain a low fee for usage? This issue becomes even more acute if users take advantage of the "unlimited" usage and actually start talking on the phone for long periods of time (i.e. if voip takes off with the teenage girl crowd, are these voip providers screwed?).
Given that, will voip pricing have to increase to make up the slack? If isp's (like RR) start metering their service, does that place extra burden on the voip providers? Also, given that email, IM, etc have taken over some of the roles of communication, is this really a cost effective form of communication ($/bit is pretty expensive for voip vs say email). Though obviously voice wins out over email for the personal touch.
For me personally, this is a non-issue. I have RR, but we use our land lines very infrequently. Both my wife and I work, so many calls get made from the office. And most other calls happen on the cell phone. So we only pay for the cheapest local line, which is way cheaper than $20/month. I guess if we made mucho long distance calls, then this might be an issue.
... even better, defaced. A group has made giant stickers saying, "I AM UGLY LITTER" and pasted them over these "work from home/lose weight now" things.
Uh, how is this better from the standpoint of visual litter. How does defacing something that's defacing something make things any better than the original defacing? If they're going to take the time to get out of their vehicles and paste a sticker on the sign, they could just as well remove the sign, which (in theory) would be helping to solve the problem vs simply adding to it.
Chewie: grunt, grunt, roar, roar, snarl (translation: do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese on Endor?)
Han: they don't call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
Chewie: roar, grunt, grunt, roar (no man, they got the metric system, they wouldn't know what the f*ck a quarter pounder is)
Han: then what do they call it?
Chewbaca: roar, roar, howl (a Royale With Cheese)
Han: "A Royale With Cheese"!, what do they call a Big Mac?
Chewie: grunt, roar, snarl, snarl, grunt, grunt, roar, snarl (a BigMac is a BigMac, but they call it "Le Big Mac"
Han: "Le Big Mac", hahaha. What do they call a Whopper?
Chewbaca: howl, howl, snarl, roar (I don't know, the Empire blew up the Burger King)
Scene: Princess Leia on the dusty floor, her shirt open revealing a lacy green bra, she's not breathing.
Yoda: Look, you brought her here, and that means that you're giving her the shot. The day that I bring an OD-ing princess over to your cave, then I'll give her the shot.
Lando: bring out the gimp
Bobafet: but the gimps sleeping
Lando: Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then
Darth: Hand me my wallet
Leia: Which one is it?
Darth: That one that says "bad motherf*cker on it"!
ObiWan: Now let me ask you a question, Luke. When you drove in here, did you notice a sign out in front that said, "Dead droid storage"? Luke: ObiWan... ObiWan: Answer the question! Did you see a sign out in front of my house that said "Dead droid storage"? Luke: Naw man, I didn't. ObiWan: You know why you didn't see that sign? Luke: Why? ObiWan: 'Cause storin' dead droids ain't my fuckin' business!
forget all that, how about whatever the probe itself is made out of. Is fibreglass/aluminum/carbon fibre a naturally occuring substance in the target environment. And we haven't even begun to talk about micro contaminants on the surface of the vessel (dust, spores, oils from the fingers of the last guy to work on it, etc). Let's face it, ANY type of active investigation (vs passive) WILL contaminate to a degree that which you are investigating (observe my careful avoidance of the word "probe" in the last sentence ;)
Remember that with the original Playstation, Sony started with 0 market share and went on to dominate. This was in the face of the Saturn and N64, two players (though not necessarily the consoles) who up to that point, owned the market to themselves. Sony's and M$ ramp ups are similar in that they both started with nothing and used their name to push into the market. PS2 might have had the advantage of good timing, but M$ has the advantage of a very receptive marketplace (not to mention some seriously deep pockets).
If you were to replace "Playstation 2" with "Windows", and replace "XBox" with "Linux", this thread would have 1200 comments all stating how just because Windows sells more doesn't mean it's better
Uh, no we wouldn't. You can't compare the two. First and foremost, almost no one would claim that the PS2 is "better". Most people acknowlege that the xbox has a leg up hardware wise. Plus, Linux isn't being developed by a multi-billion dollar company that has monopolistic tendencies.
Fact is, in this war there is no "underdog". This a battle of two t-rex's. Two companies that know how to use their muscle to accomplish their respective goals. PUUULEEZZZE don't use the Windoze/Linux analogy here, it's a slap in the face of Linux folk everywhere (not to mention Sony).
An IBM/Sun merger just doesn't make any sense. IBM has a successful Unix division using a completely different CPU and completely different OS. If Solaris/Sparc had significant advantages OR disadvantages to AIX/Power, then maybe. Don't forget that IBM is absolutely notorious for not likeing one division canabalizing the sales from another. Heck, that's one of the factors that led to the clone market and IBM's unwillingness to innovate in the pc arena for years. So what are they going to do if then acquire Sun. Which platform do you push? What do you say to customers who are trying to buy a "IBM" solution? Nope, just a big mess.
One could also imagine scenerios where Sun customers would jump ship, since Sun has long been viewed as the anti-IBM (young and spritely vs old and lethargic). If IBM bought Sun, how many potential Sun people would look elsewhere (read PC's w/ Windoze/Linux) specifically because they DON'T want to tie themselves to IBM.
The Compaq/DEC merger was fine since Compaq for the most part didn't play in DEC's sandbox. The HP/Compaq merger has a chance (as far as Unix goes) since PA/RISC is moribund and so is Alpha. No such situation here though.
Also, one would have to imagine that the govt would have a VERY close look at any such merger, since the combined companies would own over half the Unix market and the feds are always on IBM's *ss about any type of monopolistic activities.
IBM/Sun - Just say NO.
Lagging far behind. Uh I think not. The big three (Solaris, HP/UX, AIX) are damn near head to head afa market share goes. Plus AIX has mucho respect outside the scientific community. It's regarded as a stable and performant OS. The biggest rub against AIX is how it's non "standard" about damn near everything.
IBM acquiring Sun just doesn't make any sense (see my main post).
They could always start charging like the cellular folks. A tiered structure that increases the fixed payment portion while decreaseing the variable portion. Kinda like: $29.95 for 5GB/mo $1MB thereafter, $39.95 for 10GB/mo $.50MB thereafter, etc. Personally I think this would suck (complex and confusing, just the way they like it), but you can easily see it going this way.
....
The way some people think around here, we should all pay a flat rate for gas per month. Hey, now that's an idea
The obvious solution to this issue (at least for legit sites) is to simply boycott any sites that use this technology. Boycott and email the site to let them know exactly why you're boycotting. If weather.com's hit count goes from 11.6 million to 2.4 million in a month after they unleash this "technology", then you better believe that they'll yank that thing so fast that you'll be able to hear the "wooosh". Enough people do this and enough sites react, and this abomination will go back to the rat hole from whence it came.
That said, I unfortunately can't see enough people doing this to make a difference. I hope that people will stand up and make a difference, but that typically is rare. We do have a voice, we just have to be willing to use it.
In order for pens to be useful the whole UI will need to change
Agreed, but this was also attempted back in the early days of pen computing. As an example, MagicCap was specifically designed to be pen centric allowing you to do things such as editing and navigating via gestures. It worked, but was still cumbersome (though I'm sure one could get very proficient with time). Perhaps a very radical break is required?
One thing to remeber is that most Americans who go to school learn to use a pen before they learn to type
True, but that doesn't mean that typing is a "good" way to input data into a device. Keep in mind that writing developed for a specific family of mediums (using a marking device upon some media) and that it doesn't necessarily make it an efficient solution for these types of tasks.
Man, this pen thing just keeps coming back. Does anyone remember back in the late 80's early 90's when pen computing was all the rage. PDA's were new (and large!) and everyone was going to chuck their keyboards from the tallest heights once they experience the joys of pen input. Didn't come true then, won't come true now.
Pen input is fine for certain specific applications (mobile being the obvious), but as a general purpose input device, it sucks.
Same goes for voice, it's fine in specific situations, but as a general purpose input device it is severly lacking (can you imagine an office full of people talking to their computers, ugh).
It's amazing that we haven't been able to figure out a good alternative to the ubiquitous keyboard. Maybe it's one of those inventions that just happen to hit the nail on the head (not that there can't be improvemnts to the basic keyboard, but the general concept).
"This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannasaurus, like me!"
Name the movie, the character, and what is the stuff (no, it wasn't Java).
Java
+ Sex is the same no matter who the partner is
- Sex is the same no matter who the partner is
+ Never have to explicitly clean up/no wet spot
- Automatic cleanup can occur at the most inopertune times
+ Easy to get decent sex without years of practice
- Have to go outside your "protective layer" if you want to get down and dirty
+ Quick foreplay, slow execution
- Slow execution, though with underwhelming performance
I guess this also means, no more masturbating into the toilet
Esp. if the wife is not amused by such activity and decides to reprogram the laser. Could be a 21st century Lorena Bobbit kinda thing. At least the laser would also cauterize the wound, esp helpful since there would most likely be, uh, a fair bit of blood, uh down there, oh never mind.