Hmmm, 1MW for $0.8B, that's $800/Watt. About 800x the cost of coal, and 200x the cost of old-school photovoltaics. That's quite a lot of ground to make up, especially given that presumably the largest component of expense -- launch costs -- have a very low likelihood of improving by this factor until something like the space elevator comes along.
This story seems like a hoax. The nation of Palau has only 20,000 people, and a annual GDP of $160M. Are they really going to invest in a single R&D project that costs five times their national GDP? I call BS.
And you're right, this isn't really a desktop issue- its mainly a server one.
I would argue it isn't even much of a problem on the server, realistically speaking. There just aren't that many necessarily parallel problems in reality (by which I mean, single atomic tasks that are too intensive to get the desired performance on one core). Most business computing problems involve serving a large number of (independent atomic) transactions, which is an easy problem to split across multiple cores. The fact that businesses aren't clamoring to solve this "concurrency problem" implies to me that most of their problems are solved more simply, for example with VMWare.
An important class of necessarily parallel tasks is scientific computing. What makes me skeptical that the concurrency problem can be solved in some easy general-purpose way is the fact that people have been doing parallel simulations for decades, and no good (easy) approaches have turned up.
How about people who burn DVDs WHILE they browse the web?
These are separate processes so it's trivial to split them across multiple cores. Any OS will do that today. The case of interest is when you have a single logical task that you're trying to speed up with multiprocessing, because that requires you to fundamentally rethink your algorithms.
IMHO this concurrency issue isn't a terribly big deal for desktop computers, at least for a while. Today there are very few single tasks that need >1 core to achieve good performance. Graphics rendering is one, so is video encoding. I believe that most of these will be handled as special cases, as we have seen play out with graphics (specialized parallel hardware in video cards, and all the messy details handled by libraries). Likewise, the x264 video encoder for example has multicore support built in. My point is that so long as the number of computationally intensive tasks of this sort is limited, and amenable to efficient solution using a library, the fraction of desktop programmers that have to think explicitly about concurrency will be relatively small. I.e., it will be a specialty.
Simple trading strategies like this never work. If they did, someone much smarter and better-funded than you would have exploited the hell out of them, and in so doing would have forced the inefficiency out of the market. You think you can beat the armies of math and physics PhDs on Wall Street? Gimme a break.
If you want to make money in the stock market, buy a low-cost index fund and leave it alone for at least five years. What you are doing is entertainment. I don't blame you, lots of people go to Vegas knowing they'll probably lose, but do it anyway for the fun and excitement. Just don't try to pass it off as a winning strategy, please.
First it installed Windows on itself, now it's pimping Blu-Ray drives for cash. Anything for money. Somebody's gotta stand up with me and fight The Man!
no way in hell am I going to either a) spend a small fortune on BD and HD-DVD players just in case one wins
You can go to Amazon right now and get a Toshiba HD-A2, a well-engineered HD-DVD player with HDMI+component output etc., for $150. Do you consider this expensive?
then Microsoft wins because Facebook can never find other investors at that valuation. That creates a cascade effect of investor avoidance, forcing Facebook's actual value down to where it's reasonable and Microsoft can snatch it up at a bargain.
This is such a lame theory, it's not even wrong. Explain to me why these other investors -- who you say are turned off by FB's high valuation -- won't become interested again when the valuation falls?
And exactly what do you mean when you say "forcing Facebook's actual value down". You do understand they are a private company? Their valuation is nothing more than what is implied by the investments they (a majority of their equity holders) negotiate and agree to. If they decide they need more capital to finance growth, they can always solicit future investment that values their company at $2B, or any other number. There is no sense in which they're beholden to Microsoft as a result of this. There are many, many players who can invest these quantities of cash.
The real truth here is that Microsoft was willing to stomach an overvalued investment in order to buy the pageviews they desperately need if they are to ever catch up to Google in advertising. When your own web properties suck and don't deliver enough eyeballs, this is what you resort to.
What I'm saying is that I've purchased games where I exceed the minimum requirements, but the game has been a pretty un-fun experience. I don't blame PCs for this phenomenon, just saying that with console gaming you completely eliminate the possibility of this happening.
Another way of saying it is that with a console I always automatically satisfy the "recommended" requirements. To do this on a PC it seems you need to buy a new machine -- or at least a new graphics card -- every year or so. No doubt many hardcore gamers are happy to pay the $2-3k per year it takes to stay on the bleeding edge.
One of the reasons I play PC games rather than console games is that my PC is exactly that - MY PC.
Good point -- I can see how that would be an attraction for a hardcore gamer. Of course you could buy a console + 42" HDTV for less than the cost of a typical gaming PC, but most people probably won't go that route. From my standpoint as a more casual gamer I'd rather have a TV-connected device because the screen is better than what I have on my PC.
The backward-compatibility and openness I agree are really nice on PCs. It's great to have MAME, C64 emulators, etc. The console vendors unfortunately have an incentive to break backwards-compatibility, since they want you to buy new games. X-Box Live Arcade has started offering older games for download, including a number of old classics like Robotron. These are clearly working under an emulation environment; they look identical to the originals.
This is a good list. Another con of PCs, and what ultimately drove me to buy an XBox 360, was the frequent disappointment I'd get from buying games and discovering my video hardware wasn't good enough. You have to be willing to pay what it takes to stay on the bleeding edge. With a console you experience a game exactly as the developers did. Some of the games still suck, but it generally isn't for performance reasons.
In general I don't see PC vs. console gaming as zero-sum. The bulk of development man-hours goes into artwork, level design, sound, AI algorithms, etc. -- not platform-specific coding. So if the economics are such that with 10% more labor you can port to a console (or PC), why wouldn't you? If anything I think we'll see a trend toward more simultaneous releases.
Also the X-Box 360 runs DirectX 9 (where the "X" in "X-Box" came from). My game developer friends tell me it's shockingly easy to port stuff to and from the PC platform. No doubt this commonality of API is part of Microsoft's strategy, and also points toward more simultaneous PC/X-Box releases.
I've been gaming since the beginning. When I was a kid I had a Magnavox Odyssey (which predated Atari's Pong by several years), then a 2600, then Vic-20, C64, Amiga, NES, etc.
To me, it's always been the case that 90% of games are garbage, and I don't think that percentage is particularly growing or shrinking. Robotron and Space Invaders and Tempest and Qix were brilliant games in their day, but I also remember a lot of games back then that were horrifically bad. The graphics and online play of today's games make for an experience that is much more immersive than the older games: Pole Position never felt like driving in the way that PGR does. I think another good development has been that older people now play games -- presumably because we grew up with them -- which has led to more complex, engaging games than there used to be.
The only two negative trends I've seen are:
Less gameplay diversity. Street Fighter was the Star Wars of videogames: Its huge success created a lot of very similar games, and a convergence of game styles. Today we have just a few archetypes: The FPS, the overhead map RTS game, the sports simulation, the driving game. I think in part this is driven by the very high development costs these days: (a) it makes investors more risk-averse, and (b) everyone licenses the same game engines to reduce dev cost, making too many games feel very similar
More emphasis on killing. Maybe it's because I'm now a parent of young kids, but recently it's struck me how many games focus on killing as their main challenge. I like a good FPS as much as the next person, but surely there are other types of experiences and challenges?
I think there will always be great games (like Portal) that buck the trends and do something really interesting, creative, and fun.
DirecTV has added something like 40 new HD channels over the past month, and they are all MPEG-4. It doesn't look like they've been recompressing them either; the image quality is fantastic.
The MPEG-4 is part of a proprietary channel format for DirectTV, decoded by the DirectTV box rather than your digital TV directly. The tuner in a digital TV can only decode signals that comply with the ATSC standards for digital television, which mandate MPEG-2 as the video format. One of the annoying consequences is that for captive systems with a finite-capacity channel (e.g., a cable or satellite TV operator), the operator has a very legitimate technical reason to require set top boxes for their customers: So they can use better encoding methods than MPEG-2, with greater spectral efficiency. Then again the codecs are evolving so rapidly now, and it takes so long to roll out a new TV standard, that it's probably unrealistic to expect the broadcast TV standards to be anywhere close to state-of-the-art.
Perhaps someday hardware will be fast enough that we can have a video "meta-standard": Each signal is broadcast along with the codec needed to decompress it, written to some (Turing complete) virtual machine specification. The receiver would download and execute the decoding algorithm on the fly. This would allow codecs to continue evolving, while also eliminating the need for all these set top boxes. It would also allow you to have codecs better suited to the content, for example MPEG-2 is pretty bad for cartoons (for the same reason jpeg is bad for block graphics). Of course, it would also raise the possibility of some nefarious signal crashing your TV. Turing-completeness is a two-edged sword.
An interesting aspect of the move to digital TV is that it puts over-the-air (OTA) and cable reception on an equal footing. For the simple reason that, by and large, when you receive a digital signal you receive it at 100% quality due to the use of error correcting codes. Before digital TV I always subscribed to cable because it gave me better picture quality than an antenna, but that has changed. In Sunnyvale California I receive about 40 digital channels with my antenna, including all of the major networks and several channels of PBS. So I have let my cable subscription lapse. Any "premium" content I get from iTunes, or watch commercial-less on DVD.
So I predict we'll see a resurgence of the housetop antenna. They're ugly, but they work brilliantly in combination with the digital format.
...and new channels such as broadcasting HD channels in mpeg4 as opposed to the wasteful mpeg2 used for SD broadcasts.
Unfortunately the only video encoding method employed by the US version of digital television is MPEG-2. Certainly if it were being developed today it would likely permit MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) or VC-1, which are roughly twice as bandwidth-efficient as MPEG-2 in most qualitative viewing tests. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray each mandates both of these standards in their players, in addition to MPEG-2.
So this is one of those cases where the technology is already a bit out of date before it's fully rolled out. Still it's a step forward.
If Google wanted to keep from being attacked by another party for using this idea, they could simply (and cheaply!) publish an article describing every facet of the idea
I suspect this is a troll, but I'll bite in case it isn't obvious to people. Publishing is a poor defensive strategy because it tips off your competitors. Were Google to have published the details in 2003, MSFT and everyone else would be able to copy their technology exactly as of that date. As it is, their trade secrets get published but only 4 years after the 2003 priority date. A corollary is that although people complain the USPTO is slow to examine and grant patents, for many purposes people want it to be slow. Some companies (I'm not saying Google is among them) intentionally file changes or amendments with the goal of delaying their own patent filings.
And then there are the trade secrets that companies want to retain for longer than ~4 years. In this case it's common to simply not patent and take your chances. I would bet Google has a lot of algorithms for example that fall into this category.
Positing even a single additional universe constitutes multiplying a nearly uncountable number of entities. Occam's razor is clearly incompatible with many worlds. I think that those who seriously entertain the idea don't fully understand what Occam's razor says or means.
The question is how does one apply Occam's razor in this case. The traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM has this funny aspect to it, namely that evolution of the wavefunction is unitary until you get to this magical, unexplained thing called "wavefunction collapse" for which there is no real explanation. The theory posits that collapse occurs when you make a measurement, which sounds good until you start asking what really constitutes a "measurement" (i.e., what triggers this nonunitary "collapse" process)? Any kind of recording device? Intelligence? Consciousness? Amplification of a detector signal to the macroscopic realm? Where is the dividing line between microscopic and macroscopic? Etc, etc. Nobody has ever come up with a universally satisfactory explanation of collapse within the Copenhagen framework, so at best the theory is incomplete.
What Everett did was similar to what Einstein did with relativity: In effect he said, let's take our ideas seriously and just apply them in the simplest and most uniform way we can. In the Many-Worlds interpretation there is thus no distinction between microscopic and macroscopic, and no unexplained "collapse" process. Everything is unitary evolution, and all of the questions in the last paragraph simply evaporate. Many people after Everett have worked to understand quantum measurement and decoherence processes in rigorous terms, and understand why as participants in the global wavefunction we see classical randomness and a measurement process that appears nonunitary emerge as artifacts of our imperfect information.
Tegmark sums it up well as "Many Worlds vs. Many Words". The Copenhagen interpretation gives you the economy of one universe, but at the expense of taking a lot of words to explain the nonunitary "collapse" process (and it ultimately has never succeeded). So what are we trying to economize with Occam's razor, worlds or words?
This problem would be solved most readily by increasing the standards of transparency in science. The community is still stuck inside the journal paper format, which is really only a highly synthesized final report. There is no space in hardcopy journals to publish things like base datasets, detailed statistical analyses, or simulation source code. Without these details even the most qualified peer reviewer can only do a partial job. It's a little bit like a programmer trying to do a code review with access to program output but not source code.
The online journals and repositories like arXiv could improve this situation by making more supplementary material publishable. Ideally one should be able to start from base data and follow the analytical chain to the synthesized numbers and charts appearing in the paper (and where simulations are involved, download source code that generates the results). It would be nice to see standard formats for observational data, simulation source code, etc. emerge -- and have these be published online with the paper itself. The standard in science should be as it is in mathematics, where the entire logical chain is presented for review.
Where it gets really interesting is this: suppose that every basic need of every human being could be met.
It is impossible for this to happen. There are two sorts of commodity: Zero-sum and nonzero-sum. The nonzero-sum ones (e.g., food, gadgets, medicines, entertainment, knowledge) can be made in essentially limitless quantities, and these have become shockingly cheaper and more available over time. There's no reason to believe that technology won't continue driving prices so far down that we'll all get our fill. One could argue the typical first world country is practically there already.
Then there are zero-sum commodities, which come in fixed supply and over which we humans will always be engaged in cutthroat competition. Things like the best piece of land to live on, social status, the most attractive member of the opposite sex, an acceptance letter from Harvard... No amount of technology will make these easy to get, sci-fi fantasies be damned.
One insidious thing consumer culture does is take nonzero-sum commodities and masquerade them as zero-sum. Take cars, for example. A basic car that gets you from A to B is affordable to nearly everyone, and is reliable and comfortable. But then we willingly allow the car to get imbued with an element of social status, which is zero-sum. Suddenly we aren't satisfied until we have the $120k Porsche, which by design has been priced so that not everyone can have it (hence its role as a status symbol). We have this stupid tendency to turn everything into zero-sum status symbols: Shoes, jeans, handbags, eyeglasses, iPods, drinking water, writing pens, wristwatches, etc.
If you want to be happier, I suggest that rather than renouncing technology as this book would seem to argue for, you should instead renounce the consumer marketing that urges you to turn every stupid thing into a status symbol. Raise yourself above the marketing, understand what they're trying to do to you and why.
content progression becomes so deep and so complex that new or casual players must spend 4-6 months to join their friends who have been playing for months or years. Worse, the new or casual player represents a drag on the resources of any player that wants to help them level.
That's nothing. Right now I'm spending most of my time in this immersive multiplayer game that literally takes years to learn. Every player who wants to succeed needs to suffer through these lengthy and totally contrived tutorial environments ("college", "grad school"). Even worse, all the players who started earlier are constantly taking advantage of me ("get off my land!", "don't steal my stuff!", "where's my rent?!?"). To top it off, weapons and fighting/killing are practically banned. Where's the fun? This game sucks.
IMHO the blurring between theoretical and applied roles in CS has to do with everyone's free access to the tools of the trade. It's easy to get simple software working: All you need is a computer and free compiler/interpreter and you can starting writing code. By contrast, in other fields there are usually barriers that make the theoretical/applied division clearer. In my own field of physics, for example, interesting experiments are expensive -- at least $100k to set up a minimal lab, millions in some fields. In other applied areas (medicine = applied biology, architecture = applied mechanics), the potential for harm from incompetence has led to professional accrediting organizations, again creating barriers and more delineated roles.
In general I think the accessibility of "applied CS" is a good thing. It democratizes the tools of production, giving anyone the ability to build a web site, start a blog, become an online retailer, etc. The flip side is that the simplicity makes it easy to deceive oneself about the difficulty of building complex systems well. The observed reality is that the methods used to build "small" systems with a few hundred lines don't scale well to "large" systems with 10^5+ lines. But it's easy to forget this and not perceive the need for a separate software engineering discipline.
An open, electronic journal could work with a moderation system not unlike Slashdot, or even better, Everything2. User could get registered, and acquire reputation by writing articles having good reviews. Moderation systems work well for comments and E2 nodes; why not for scientific articles?
Maybe a user-moderated system could work, but I'm skeptical that moderation done entirely by users will result in high overall quality. Then again maybe you don't care about maintaining high quality across all articles, if you have a system that assigns quality scores and allows you to select out the good articles if you choose. Maybe this is ok, in effect the price we pay for instant publishing.
If this is the case, then merely publishing in the online journal would not have a reputational impact. The scientific community will need other reputational metrics, like what is your mean rating and how many references did you get to your articles. These metrics would unfortunately be somewhat subject to manipulation (the academic equivalent of link farming).
I suspect in the near term, the impact of all this will be a movement among academics to avoid publishing in the highest-cost journals. IMHO it will take much longer for hardcopy journals to be "replaced" in any sense.
Nobody has yet mentioned the reason expensive journals persist in an era of cheap typesetting and distribution. It's because they provide two (inter-related) things to the science community:
Quality control. For the good journals, when you submit an article it is typically reviewed (anonymously) by at least three of your peers, who make comments that are forwarded to you for response. You either argue your case against the reviewers or change your paper to accommodate. Then the reviewers see your counterarguments and/or changes and make further comments, etc. Sitting in the middle of this are 1-2 (very knowledgeable) editors refereeing the process, and your paper doesn't get published until they approve it. (This large amount of back-and-forth also contributes to high cost.) Sometimes this review process can take 6 months or longer to complete, which is why preprint sites like arXiv have flourished. ArXiv has taken many months out of the cycle time of the scientific process. But since anybody can post to arXiv, a lot of the papers there are frankly pretty kooky and would never make it through peer review.
A reputational mechanism. Because of #1 it's a big deal to publish in a high-quality journal. Academics typically cannot directly evaluate their peers in different fields -- topics are very specialized in modern research -- but all physicists know that Physical Review Letters is a good journal, and if a colleague has published there several times it says something about his or her ability. By contrast, the number of preprints posted on arXiv carries no reputational value.
I agree the current system is bad and needs to be changed. My point is that it isn't so simple a problem to solve as many Slashdotters might believe. We're talking here about one of the primary mechanisms influencing people's research careers (which jobs they get, whether they get grant funding, which awards they win). If the money gets sucked out of publishing and the peer review process that this funds goes away, something will need to take its place as a QC mechanism for science.
$5 says articles start vanishing as "certain" governments decide that previously unclassified materials are not secret...
Uhhhh.. The idea is to take articles that are publicly available (albeit expensive) and make them publicly available (and free). This is a non-event on any security dimension.
The article, and many of the responses here, I believe confuse the issue by lumping together too many jobs under the "IT" umbrella. Innovation is critical to our economy, but the reality is that 90% of IT people aren't innovative (just as 90% of MBAs aren't innovative in business).
Properly parsed, the problem really splits into two:
How do we foster innovation? For the innovative person I think it's less about proper training or incentives (they will mostly be self-taught anyway, and would do the work for free if they had to), and more about creating the conditions wherein they can succeed: Access to venture capital, access to good IP protection (and lack of overprotection), favorable regulatory environment for starting businesses with little overhead, easy ability to relocate to the US from elsewhere, etc.
How do we build the armies of grunt soldiers to do the non-innovative work that IT departments need? Face it, most sysadmin, database admin, system configuration, and many programming jobs require very little innovation or creative thought. They do require some training, but really any fairly intelligent person in the world could do it.
For the individual "IT professional", you need to figure out which bucket you fall into. If you're one of the 95% in the latter, the trends toward outsourcing will not be kind. Once upon a time IT departments had plenty of well-paid, secure jobs like "System Analyst". These same companies are frankly looking at their expensive IT departments and wondering if they're more problem than solution. This is no different from what happened to the highly-paid, semi-skilled US auto worker of the 1970s-1980s. Some were able to move up-market in innovative ways (specialty fabrication shops, etc.), while many are now truck drivers or working at Walmart.
Gates confuses the question by using "innovation" to argue for growing the number of CS grads we put out. Bottom line is, all the innovators are doing it anyway (or dropping out of college, as Gates did, to get it done faster). Churning out more CS grads just grows the army of grunt soldiers. And it's not clear that more grunt soldiers positively influences "innovation". Maybe having fewer grunts puts healthy pressure elsewhere in the system to improve scalability and reusability. For example, expensive IT people might encourage OS vendors to turn out products that don't require armies of desktop support people to keep machines clear of malware, registry corruption, etc. (Ahem.)
The only good reason to send people outside of low Earth orbit is to establish a self-sustaining continuous human presence off the Earth. We would do this for many reasons, for example expanding the economy, or insuring against global catastrophe.
The problem with Apollo was that it was focused on a different goal, that of beating the Russians to the Moon asap. It was a big success in this regard but did a very poor job of advancing the colonization goal. NASA investigated Apollo-style missions to Mars but they were frighteningly expensive and so the program died.
I believe a properly-conceived return to the Moon should focus on advancing the goal of human colonization. Most important is gaining practical experience with In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), NASA's fancy term for living off the land. If we develop good techniques to extract the water near the lunar poles it would be a huge step toward self-sufficiency, and a stepping stone for further missions (like Zubrin's ISRU-based Mars Direct concept).
Beyond ISRU, achieving real self-sufficiency will require at least two other problems to be solved: (1) How to create self-sufficient biospheres of modest size that can support human life without frequent supplies replenishment from Earth (think Biosphere 2 in space), and (2) how to generate positive economic returns from space-based activities, to fund all of the things that will need to be imported from Earth to a colony during the (possibly long) period of partial self-sufficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, 1MW for $0.8B, that's $800/Watt. About 800x the cost of coal, and 200x the cost of old-school photovoltaics. That's quite a lot of ground to make up, especially given that presumably the largest component of expense -- launch costs -- have a very low likelihood of improving by this factor until something like the space elevator comes along.
This story seems like a hoax. The nation of Palau has only 20,000 people, and a annual GDP of $160M. Are they really going to invest in a single R&D project that costs five times their national GDP? I call BS.
And you're right, this isn't really a desktop issue- its mainly a server one.
I would argue it isn't even much of a problem on the server, realistically speaking. There just aren't that many necessarily parallel problems in reality (by which I mean, single atomic tasks that are too intensive to get the desired performance on one core). Most business computing problems involve serving a large number of (independent atomic) transactions, which is an easy problem to split across multiple cores. The fact that businesses aren't clamoring to solve this "concurrency problem" implies to me that most of their problems are solved more simply, for example with VMWare.
An important class of necessarily parallel tasks is scientific computing. What makes me skeptical that the concurrency problem can be solved in some easy general-purpose way is the fact that people have been doing parallel simulations for decades, and no good (easy) approaches have turned up.
How about people who burn DVDs WHILE they browse the web?
These are separate processes so it's trivial to split them across multiple cores. Any OS will do that today. The case of interest is when you have a single logical task that you're trying to speed up with multiprocessing, because that requires you to fundamentally rethink your algorithms.
IMHO this concurrency issue isn't a terribly big deal for desktop computers, at least for a while. Today there are very few single tasks that need >1 core to achieve good performance. Graphics rendering is one, so is video encoding. I believe that most of these will be handled as special cases, as we have seen play out with graphics (specialized parallel hardware in video cards, and all the messy details handled by libraries). Likewise, the x264 video encoder for example has multicore support built in. My point is that so long as the number of computationally intensive tasks of this sort is limited, and amenable to efficient solution using a library, the fraction of desktop programmers that have to think explicitly about concurrency will be relatively small. I.e., it will be a specialty.
Simple trading strategies like this never work. If they did, someone much smarter and better-funded than you would have exploited the hell out of them, and in so doing would have forced the inefficiency out of the market. You think you can beat the armies of math and physics PhDs on Wall Street? Gimme a break.
If you want to make money in the stock market, buy a low-cost index fund and leave it alone for at least five years. What you are doing is entertainment. I don't blame you, lots of people go to Vegas knowing they'll probably lose, but do it anyway for the fun and excitement. Just don't try to pass it off as a winning strategy, please.
First it installed Windows on itself, now it's pimping Blu-Ray drives for cash. Anything for money. Somebody's gotta stand up with me and fight The Man!
no way in hell am I going to either a) spend a small fortune on BD and HD-DVD players just in case one wins
You can go to Amazon right now and get a Toshiba HD-A2, a well-engineered HD-DVD player with HDMI+component output etc., for $150. Do you consider this expensive?
then Microsoft wins because Facebook can never find other investors at that valuation. That creates a cascade effect of investor avoidance, forcing Facebook's actual value down to where it's reasonable and Microsoft can snatch it up at a bargain.
This is such a lame theory, it's not even wrong. Explain to me why these other investors -- who you say are turned off by FB's high valuation -- won't become interested again when the valuation falls?
And exactly what do you mean when you say "forcing Facebook's actual value down". You do understand they are a private company? Their valuation is nothing more than what is implied by the investments they (a majority of their equity holders) negotiate and agree to. If they decide they need more capital to finance growth, they can always solicit future investment that values their company at $2B, or any other number. There is no sense in which they're beholden to Microsoft as a result of this. There are many, many players who can invest these quantities of cash.
The real truth here is that Microsoft was willing to stomach an overvalued investment in order to buy the pageviews they desperately need if they are to ever catch up to Google in advertising. When your own web properties suck and don't deliver enough eyeballs, this is what you resort to.
What I'm saying is that I've purchased games where I exceed the minimum requirements, but the game has been a pretty un-fun experience. I don't blame PCs for this phenomenon, just saying that with console gaming you completely eliminate the possibility of this happening.
Another way of saying it is that with a console I always automatically satisfy the "recommended" requirements. To do this on a PC it seems you need to buy a new machine -- or at least a new graphics card -- every year or so. No doubt many hardcore gamers are happy to pay the $2-3k per year it takes to stay on the bleeding edge.
One of the reasons I play PC games rather than console games is that my PC is exactly that - MY PC.
Good point -- I can see how that would be an attraction for a hardcore gamer. Of course you could buy a console + 42" HDTV for less than the cost of a typical gaming PC, but most people probably won't go that route. From my standpoint as a more casual gamer I'd rather have a TV-connected device because the screen is better than what I have on my PC.
The backward-compatibility and openness I agree are really nice on PCs. It's great to have MAME, C64 emulators, etc. The console vendors unfortunately have an incentive to break backwards-compatibility, since they want you to buy new games. X-Box Live Arcade has started offering older games for download, including a number of old classics like Robotron. These are clearly working under an emulation environment; they look identical to the originals.
This is a good list. Another con of PCs, and what ultimately drove me to buy an XBox 360, was the frequent disappointment I'd get from buying games and discovering my video hardware wasn't good enough. You have to be willing to pay what it takes to stay on the bleeding edge. With a console you experience a game exactly as the developers did. Some of the games still suck, but it generally isn't for performance reasons.
In general I don't see PC vs. console gaming as zero-sum. The bulk of development man-hours goes into artwork, level design, sound, AI algorithms, etc. -- not platform-specific coding. So if the economics are such that with 10% more labor you can port to a console (or PC), why wouldn't you? If anything I think we'll see a trend toward more simultaneous releases.
Also the X-Box 360 runs DirectX 9 (where the "X" in "X-Box" came from). My game developer friends tell me it's shockingly easy to port stuff to and from the PC platform. No doubt this commonality of API is part of Microsoft's strategy, and also points toward more simultaneous PC/X-Box releases.
I've been gaming since the beginning. When I was a kid I had a Magnavox Odyssey (which predated Atari's Pong by several years), then a 2600, then Vic-20, C64, Amiga, NES, etc.
To me, it's always been the case that 90% of games are garbage, and I don't think that percentage is particularly growing or shrinking. Robotron and Space Invaders and Tempest and Qix were brilliant games in their day, but I also remember a lot of games back then that were horrifically bad. The graphics and online play of today's games make for an experience that is much more immersive than the older games: Pole Position never felt like driving in the way that PGR does. I think another good development has been that older people now play games -- presumably because we grew up with them -- which has led to more complex, engaging games than there used to be.
The only two negative trends I've seen are:
I think there will always be great games (like Portal) that buck the trends and do something really interesting, creative, and fun.
DirecTV has added something like 40 new HD channels over the past month, and they are all MPEG-4. It doesn't look like they've been recompressing them either; the image quality is fantastic.
The MPEG-4 is part of a proprietary channel format for DirectTV, decoded by the DirectTV box rather than your digital TV directly. The tuner in a digital TV can only decode signals that comply with the ATSC standards for digital television, which mandate MPEG-2 as the video format. One of the annoying consequences is that for captive systems with a finite-capacity channel (e.g., a cable or satellite TV operator), the operator has a very legitimate technical reason to require set top boxes for their customers: So they can use better encoding methods than MPEG-2, with greater spectral efficiency. Then again the codecs are evolving so rapidly now, and it takes so long to roll out a new TV standard, that it's probably unrealistic to expect the broadcast TV standards to be anywhere close to state-of-the-art.
Perhaps someday hardware will be fast enough that we can have a video "meta-standard": Each signal is broadcast along with the codec needed to decompress it, written to some (Turing complete) virtual machine specification. The receiver would download and execute the decoding algorithm on the fly. This would allow codecs to continue evolving, while also eliminating the need for all these set top boxes. It would also allow you to have codecs better suited to the content, for example MPEG-2 is pretty bad for cartoons (for the same reason jpeg is bad for block graphics). Of course, it would also raise the possibility of some nefarious signal crashing your TV. Turing-completeness is a two-edged sword.
An interesting aspect of the move to digital TV is that it puts over-the-air (OTA) and cable reception on an equal footing. For the simple reason that, by and large, when you receive a digital signal you receive it at 100% quality due to the use of error correcting codes. Before digital TV I always subscribed to cable because it gave me better picture quality than an antenna, but that has changed. In Sunnyvale California I receive about 40 digital channels with my antenna, including all of the major networks and several channels of PBS. So I have let my cable subscription lapse. Any "premium" content I get from iTunes, or watch commercial-less on DVD.
So I predict we'll see a resurgence of the housetop antenna. They're ugly, but they work brilliantly in combination with the digital format.
Unfortunately the only video encoding method employed by the US version of digital television is MPEG-2. Certainly if it were being developed today it would likely permit MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) or VC-1, which are roughly twice as bandwidth-efficient as MPEG-2 in most qualitative viewing tests. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray each mandates both of these standards in their players, in addition to MPEG-2.
So this is one of those cases where the technology is already a bit out of date before it's fully rolled out. Still it's a step forward.
If Google wanted to keep from being attacked by another party for using this idea, they could simply (and cheaply!) publish an article describing every facet of the idea
I suspect this is a troll, but I'll bite in case it isn't obvious to people. Publishing is a poor defensive strategy because it tips off your competitors. Were Google to have published the details in 2003, MSFT and everyone else would be able to copy their technology exactly as of that date. As it is, their trade secrets get published but only 4 years after the 2003 priority date. A corollary is that although people complain the USPTO is slow to examine and grant patents, for many purposes people want it to be slow. Some companies (I'm not saying Google is among them) intentionally file changes or amendments with the goal of delaying their own patent filings.
And then there are the trade secrets that companies want to retain for longer than ~4 years. In this case it's common to simply not patent and take your chances. I would bet Google has a lot of algorithms for example that fall into this category.
Positing even a single additional universe constitutes multiplying a nearly uncountable number of entities. Occam's razor is clearly incompatible with many worlds. I think that those who seriously entertain the idea don't fully understand what Occam's razor says or means.
The question is how does one apply Occam's razor in this case. The traditional Copenhagen interpretation of QM has this funny aspect to it, namely that evolution of the wavefunction is unitary until you get to this magical, unexplained thing called "wavefunction collapse" for which there is no real explanation. The theory posits that collapse occurs when you make a measurement, which sounds good until you start asking what really constitutes a "measurement" (i.e., what triggers this nonunitary "collapse" process)? Any kind of recording device? Intelligence? Consciousness? Amplification of a detector signal to the macroscopic realm? Where is the dividing line between microscopic and macroscopic? Etc, etc. Nobody has ever come up with a universally satisfactory explanation of collapse within the Copenhagen framework, so at best the theory is incomplete.
What Everett did was similar to what Einstein did with relativity: In effect he said, let's take our ideas seriously and just apply them in the simplest and most uniform way we can. In the Many-Worlds interpretation there is thus no distinction between microscopic and macroscopic, and no unexplained "collapse" process. Everything is unitary evolution, and all of the questions in the last paragraph simply evaporate. Many people after Everett have worked to understand quantum measurement and decoherence processes in rigorous terms, and understand why as participants in the global wavefunction we see classical randomness and a measurement process that appears nonunitary emerge as artifacts of our imperfect information.
Tegmark sums it up well as "Many Worlds vs. Many Words". The Copenhagen interpretation gives you the economy of one universe, but at the expense of taking a lot of words to explain the nonunitary "collapse" process (and it ultimately has never succeeded). So what are we trying to economize with Occam's razor, worlds or words?
This problem would be solved most readily by increasing the standards of transparency in science. The community is still stuck inside the journal paper format, which is really only a highly synthesized final report. There is no space in hardcopy journals to publish things like base datasets, detailed statistical analyses, or simulation source code. Without these details even the most qualified peer reviewer can only do a partial job. It's a little bit like a programmer trying to do a code review with access to program output but not source code.
The online journals and repositories like arXiv could improve this situation by making more supplementary material publishable. Ideally one should be able to start from base data and follow the analytical chain to the synthesized numbers and charts appearing in the paper (and where simulations are involved, download source code that generates the results). It would be nice to see standard formats for observational data, simulation source code, etc. emerge -- and have these be published online with the paper itself. The standard in science should be as it is in mathematics, where the entire logical chain is presented for review.
Where it gets really interesting is this: suppose that every basic need of every human being could be met.
It is impossible for this to happen. There are two sorts of commodity: Zero-sum and nonzero-sum. The nonzero-sum ones (e.g., food, gadgets, medicines, entertainment, knowledge) can be made in essentially limitless quantities, and these have become shockingly cheaper and more available over time. There's no reason to believe that technology won't continue driving prices so far down that we'll all get our fill. One could argue the typical first world country is practically there already.
Then there are zero-sum commodities, which come in fixed supply and over which we humans will always be engaged in cutthroat competition. Things like the best piece of land to live on, social status, the most attractive member of the opposite sex, an acceptance letter from Harvard... No amount of technology will make these easy to get, sci-fi fantasies be damned.
One insidious thing consumer culture does is take nonzero-sum commodities and masquerade them as zero-sum. Take cars, for example. A basic car that gets you from A to B is affordable to nearly everyone, and is reliable and comfortable. But then we willingly allow the car to get imbued with an element of social status, which is zero-sum. Suddenly we aren't satisfied until we have the $120k Porsche, which by design has been priced so that not everyone can have it (hence its role as a status symbol). We have this stupid tendency to turn everything into zero-sum status symbols: Shoes, jeans, handbags, eyeglasses, iPods, drinking water, writing pens, wristwatches, etc.
If you want to be happier, I suggest that rather than renouncing technology as this book would seem to argue for, you should instead renounce the consumer marketing that urges you to turn every stupid thing into a status symbol. Raise yourself above the marketing, understand what they're trying to do to you and why.
content progression becomes so deep and so complex that new or casual players must spend 4-6 months to join their friends who have been playing for months or years. Worse, the new or casual player represents a drag on the resources of any player that wants to help them level.
That's nothing. Right now I'm spending most of my time in this immersive multiplayer game that literally takes years to learn. Every player who wants to succeed needs to suffer through these lengthy and totally contrived tutorial environments ("college", "grad school"). Even worse, all the players who started earlier are constantly taking advantage of me ("get off my land!", "don't steal my stuff!", "where's my rent?!?"). To top it off, weapons and fighting/killing are practically banned. Where's the fun? This game sucks.
IMHO the blurring between theoretical and applied roles in CS has to do with everyone's free access to the tools of the trade. It's easy to get simple software working: All you need is a computer and free compiler/interpreter and you can starting writing code. By contrast, in other fields there are usually barriers that make the theoretical/applied division clearer. In my own field of physics, for example, interesting experiments are expensive -- at least $100k to set up a minimal lab, millions in some fields. In other applied areas (medicine = applied biology, architecture = applied mechanics), the potential for harm from incompetence has led to professional accrediting organizations, again creating barriers and more delineated roles.
In general I think the accessibility of "applied CS" is a good thing. It democratizes the tools of production, giving anyone the ability to build a web site, start a blog, become an online retailer, etc. The flip side is that the simplicity makes it easy to deceive oneself about the difficulty of building complex systems well. The observed reality is that the methods used to build "small" systems with a few hundred lines don't scale well to "large" systems with 10^5+ lines. But it's easy to forget this and not perceive the need for a separate software engineering discipline.
An open, electronic journal could work with a moderation system not unlike Slashdot, or even better, Everything2. User could get registered, and acquire reputation by writing articles having good reviews. Moderation systems work well for comments and E2 nodes; why not for scientific articles?
Maybe a user-moderated system could work, but I'm skeptical that moderation done entirely by users will result in high overall quality. Then again maybe you don't care about maintaining high quality across all articles, if you have a system that assigns quality scores and allows you to select out the good articles if you choose. Maybe this is ok, in effect the price we pay for instant publishing.
If this is the case, then merely publishing in the online journal would not have a reputational impact. The scientific community will need other reputational metrics, like what is your mean rating and how many references did you get to your articles. These metrics would unfortunately be somewhat subject to manipulation (the academic equivalent of link farming).
I suspect in the near term, the impact of all this will be a movement among academics to avoid publishing in the highest-cost journals. IMHO it will take much longer for hardcopy journals to be "replaced" in any sense.
Nobody has yet mentioned the reason expensive journals persist in an era of cheap typesetting and distribution. It's because they provide two (inter-related) things to the science community:
I agree the current system is bad and needs to be changed. My point is that it isn't so simple a problem to solve as many Slashdotters might believe. We're talking here about one of the primary mechanisms influencing people's research careers (which jobs they get, whether they get grant funding, which awards they win). If the money gets sucked out of publishing and the peer review process that this funds goes away, something will need to take its place as a QC mechanism for science.
$5 says articles start vanishing as "certain" governments decide that previously unclassified materials are not secret ...
Uhhhh.. The idea is to take articles that are publicly available (albeit expensive) and make them publicly available (and free). This is a non-event on any security dimension.
The article, and many of the responses here, I believe confuse the issue by lumping together too many jobs under the "IT" umbrella. Innovation is critical to our economy, but the reality is that 90% of IT people aren't innovative (just as 90% of MBAs aren't innovative in business).
Properly parsed, the problem really splits into two:
For the individual "IT professional", you need to figure out which bucket you fall into. If you're one of the 95% in the latter, the trends toward outsourcing will not be kind. Once upon a time IT departments had plenty of well-paid, secure jobs like "System Analyst". These same companies are frankly looking at their expensive IT departments and wondering if they're more problem than solution. This is no different from what happened to the highly-paid, semi-skilled US auto worker of the 1970s-1980s. Some were able to move up-market in innovative ways (specialty fabrication shops, etc.), while many are now truck drivers or working at Walmart.
Gates confuses the question by using "innovation" to argue for growing the number of CS grads we put out. Bottom line is, all the innovators are doing it anyway (or dropping out of college, as Gates did, to get it done faster). Churning out more CS grads just grows the army of grunt soldiers. And it's not clear that more grunt soldiers positively influences "innovation". Maybe having fewer grunts puts healthy pressure elsewhere in the system to improve scalability and reusability. For example, expensive IT people might encourage OS vendors to turn out products that don't require armies of desktop support people to keep machines clear of malware, registry corruption, etc. (Ahem.)
The only good reason to send people outside of low Earth orbit is to establish a self-sustaining continuous human presence off the Earth. We would do this for many reasons, for example expanding the economy, or insuring against global catastrophe.
The problem with Apollo was that it was focused on a different goal, that of beating the Russians to the Moon asap. It was a big success in this regard but did a very poor job of advancing the colonization goal. NASA investigated Apollo-style missions to Mars but they were frighteningly expensive and so the program died.
I believe a properly-conceived return to the Moon should focus on advancing the goal of human colonization. Most important is gaining practical experience with In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), NASA's fancy term for living off the land. If we develop good techniques to extract the water near the lunar poles it would be a huge step toward self-sufficiency, and a stepping stone for further missions (like Zubrin's ISRU-based Mars Direct concept).
Beyond ISRU, achieving real self-sufficiency will require at least two other problems to be solved: (1) How to create self-sufficient biospheres of modest size that can support human life without frequent supplies replenishment from Earth (think Biosphere 2 in space), and (2) how to generate positive economic returns from space-based activities, to fund all of the things that will need to be imported from Earth to a colony during the (possibly long) period of partial self-sufficiency.