...is that it is speech. But it is speech unlike any speech that has ever been before. Never before has there been speech that one could speak into a machine and alter the reality of that machine. It is far more powerful than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater (that being an example of reasonably restricted speech) with the advent of the modern internet it seems silly to think that you can keep this powerful speech in a bottle and sell it. In many ways it is a bit like trying to put the genie back in the bottle...
Yet that's just what commerical software is all about. Bottling speech and selling it in crates. And there isn't anything wrong with that. That's what commerce is all about. Yet, things eventually become commodities and you lose that limited monopoly after a while. Just as light-bulbs are made by many companies now and some people would pause before buying a lamp that required a special light bulb.
Interestingly people buy lamps that require special bulbs... some times even bulbs that are patented and only made by one company. Some of these lamps provide brighter full-spectrum light, some provide a more pleasant shade of light. And other people find having a violet tinge in their light simply not worthy of the extra expense... and they buy lamps that take standard light bulbs.
I firmly believe that this will happen with software. And if you read the article you can garner the same points. Oracle buying OSS startups or Microsoft hiring off Distribution maintainers only causes a delay in the development of the inevitable. That delay is not without its profit margin. And the act of slowing the adoption of the OSS mind-set in the general public may be a necessary evil to allow humanity to adjust to this new powerful force on the face of the planet.
OpenSource empowers outsourcing in India and China as much as it empowers rural US and small European Universities. In time the natural market forces will shift finding a new balance in the world. Wages in India and China will equalize with those in the US. However, the rate of this shift can be controlled... I'm not sure if it is better to slow down or speed up this shift... but I know that those who are successful in today's world have an incentive to keep the world the same. Oracle and Microsoft for example did well in a world of bottled genies and they want that key to their success to stay the same. It is only natural.
OpenSource on the Internet means that someone who couldn't afford to do a thing before can now do that thing (see Nagios from the article) and leverage the talent of all the other people in the world who could not climb over that initial barrier to entry. OpenSource on the Internet means that the Software playing field is flatter. If you can get an OSS person to help you and you can afford their salary... you can do nearly the same thing as the really big companies. If the rest of your business runs well, technology need not be the biggest of your concerns.
Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have built their very lives on technology being a big concern. And all that cash they have means that they can sway the direction of technology onto paths that benefit themselves. Eventually, however, just as relationships with the light bulb maker doesn't drive the central concerns of most businesses today, neither will software in a hundred years.
In one hundred years what will matter is that this was a time of innovation that generated technology that changed the course of history. Just as pop. culture is confused about how much Edison really did to invent the light bulb and electrical grid they will also very likely decide that Bill Gates was the inventor of the Personal Computer and the Internet. With a little luck they will find it silly that we used to buy software in boxes. With even more luck they will find it a silly idea to pay for software at all and instead will have established a concept of "commissioning software" to be created by those talented in the "craft" an
Third, SHUT THE FUCK UP, not everything needs to be done with mozilla.
I disagree, I even floss with Mozilla.
Also, I'd pay real money to see the code for a program that used a serial device as datasource and XUL for display. If someone could do that reguardless of if they should or not... it'd be a hoot to see. Maybe we could write an FDISK interface in XUL. Now that would be too XUL for SKUL... err.. school.
Think Geek has this:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/77ba/
A keyboard where you can tile the keys however you feel like. It's for gamers but I'm sure you could make it work for your purposes.
The Delta II can use up to 9 strap on rocket boosters in addition to the main main motor. This configuration has flown successfully for many years. If they try to make all 10 boosters controllable I could see them having problems (like the Soviet Moon rocket). If they just have a few motors for control and use the rest for boost it will probably be an easier task.
Thank you, that's very informative. The subtle difference is the idea of a control rocket versus a boost rocket. Boost rockets being easier to coordinate than individual control rockets. I wasn't aware of the difference... I'm just a computer geek.
from the article:
The spacecraft is expected to launch vertical atop a stack of about 10 Canadian Arrow rocket engines and land horizontally on an aircraft runway, they added.
If I remember my space history correctly, Russia had a moon rocket design that tried to incorporate the firing of 20 or more independant rocket motors. The design proved far too complex for the electronics of the day to coordinate and control.
With todays computer processing power I'll be interested to see if the problem of coordinating that many rocket motors simultaneously has become trivial enough to make a reliable launch vehicle.
IIRC: The old soviet rockets would spin out of control.
Not pretty, but if space and processing power is truly at such a premium...
At this point I'll point out that the original poster was talking about deploying an entire HTTP server with HTML in the device. If it was even possible to do that, then we know the device was in a class that would allow such waste as an XML export. His idea of pushing HTML from his device to the browser is perhaps one of the single worst ideas I've ever heard. If this is a one off project that nobody cares about, then fine, but if anyone is going to have to live with this product... pushing HTML from an embedded device is a horrifically bad idea.
Text is beautiful in that it never suffers from endian or other platform issues. It is, however, larger and requires parsing. If you use the markup language you won't have to map the datagrams between Ada and C and Irix and Linux on the x86 in 12 years when your original embedded data source is still in use but your middle teir servers that parse the data source are utterly obsolete.
Text may cost more, but proper use of text would have saved at least one embedded system I know of. When we're talking about applications that will live decades and when we're talking about a system where an embedded HTTP server isn't outlandish... text makes sense. Text doesn't suffer from endian issues, cryptic formats, or the random undocumented datastructure.
There are reasons for each type of data representation, but, for this type of use text is king.
If we were really talking about a system with no networking on it then talking about XML would be silly, but no more silly than talking about an HTTP server on such a device. Never ever, ever never, never ever use a binary format to transmit data you're just going to plop on a web-page. Never embed an HTTP server and HTML documents onto a device if you can at all help it. If you find yourself stuffing HTML onto a device give yourself a way to do maintenance. Somebody might think your webpages are ugly.
So it sounds like most devices could read and write text now-a-days right? If that's so then maybe they could write text that was generically formatted into some kind of mark-up language... an ML. We want something really generic so let's call it "XML" and all this XML would do is represent a data structure. You would print it to a socket. So even if you had a very teeny tiny embedded device that at least could do networking, could at least use a couple of Kbytes of RAM that device's data structures could be read by another program. Perhaps a bigger heavier program living on a box with lots more space and more readily modified so the output could be "pretty printed" to a data browsing program of some kind.
Getting data back into the teeny weeny device could also be accomplished by reading data posted to the socket. So the idea here is that if you have an itsy bitsy teeny weeny device that is beefy enough to read and write to a socket on a networking infrastructure of some kind... then you could use a different system to produce UI things like web-pages.
The crazy idea here is: why not use XMLHTTP everywhere? DO NOT spend your time trying to make pretty webpages on an itsy bitsy device that will have your sloppy gawd-awful HTML burned into its firmware... instead make generic web-service interfaces that a real (tm) web person can hook into using some kind of XML service architecture.
Can he open a socket? Can he put characters to it? Can he read characters from it? Maybe 2 or 3 MB is too little to do that in. What do you need to read and write text? Maybe 128 MB or so?
You might consider a very minimal XML interface on top of a very very very simple HTTP server. Your UI could live on a completely different device on a completely different server... or on the same server in a different application stack. You could run your service on port 8080 or something if you didn't want to run it on 80 to prevent
You could display your state as a single XML document that is gotten at a single URL. Each setting could be manipulated by posting to a URL specified in the XML document. These sets of documents and post URLs could become a simple CGI set of interfaces you could describe for anything from webservers, application servers, or other web-aware C++ programs to hook into.
Still very bleeding-edge, however, I have seen right-click examples on other sites and the point here is that of motivated you could approximate windows in simple HTML and Javascript. You're right. I can't find anyone actually using this anywhere... I've been working with Rico actually. But I keep an eye on Qooxdoo because its only a matter of time before someone tries to build a real app with this.
Besides QooxDoo and Rico fill different spaces in a complete Ajax application. QooxDoo is effects, Rico is communication.
If you have seen QooxDoo then you probably thought the same thing I did when you saw it: "Microsoft should be freaking out about this!" Later when I learned that AJAX comes from discarded Microsoft Technology I realized that Microsoft had pulled a Xerox. Just as Xerox threw away the chance to be the leader of Desktop Software and gave away the GUI and Mouse... Microsoft handed Google a lead. The problem is, this is Microsoft not Xerox we're talking about. Will Google keep that lead?
I installed Ubuntu on an old Compaq Laptop (a horrid old Presario) I have lying around and everything just worked! Even my Orinoco Wifi card just plain worked. Even Suspend just plain worked. I couldn't believe it. They're doing something right. I just hope Shuttleworth's profit model works out for him.
If you don't like the XML in Ajax, try JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). With JSON you can implement Ajax without all the XML bloat. Ajax is more about the Asynchronous than it is about the XML. So Ajax without the XML and with JSON is... AJAJ?
Single most important thing is to have enough displays. I can't imagine working in less than two displays. One display for code the other to monitor the code's results or read documentation.
Seriously. Two displays. Code on the left, output on the right. Code left, query results right. Code left, webpage right. Code left, compiler and tests right. You see bugs on the right and make bug fixes on the left screen. You make bugs on the left screen and see them on the right screen.
My box is a linux box with VMware for those time you have to have windows or need to test alternate server configurations. I also have a personal copy of crossover office just so I can run Outlook and MSIE in KDE without booting the VMware machine. There are times in the development cycle when I never use VMware but I have to have Outlook everyday.
Otherwise I think I have a great setup Dual Xeons (shows 4 penguins/cpus at boot), a Gig of RAM,.5 TB storage, DVD recorder, Dual headed Nvida card, GigE on the desktop, Dual flat panels, and a keyboard arm.
If you've never used a Mouse/Keyboard arm get one. If your boss won't buy it for you get it for yourself. They run $250 but are worth every penny. The ability to float your keyboard to any position from sitting to standing is absolutely life-changing.
Only time in my life that my work computer has been far better than my home computers. Make me spend lots of time in the office. I bet that's why they buy me all these toys.
...male fetuses appear to involute fewer overproduced cortical neurons than females, this gender difference could explain in part the boys' greater functional impairments from early brain damage.
Due to the influx of testosterone early in development male fetuses often suffer damage to their brains. Specifically in the corpus callosum because the development of that region of the brain (which is the communications link between right and left hemispheres) coincides with the assertion of gender. This is manifested later during childhood by boys having poorer fine-motor control than girls of the same age. This early brain-damage may account for the statistically higher incidents of mental impairment in boys.
For all the insults their brains suffer early in life due to testosterone, the boys reap a larger brain with more brain-cells. Just as a person who repeatedly breaks their bones gets a heavier and stronger bone for their trouble... only the "strong" brain-cells survive and the brain is adapted to survive brain-damage better.
While female's brains have not had to suffer as many insults. From the same article:
...any disease that causes neuronal loss could be expected to lead to more severe functional deficits in women due to their loss of more dendritic connections per neuron lost.
It would appear then, that it is much harder to grow up to be an intelligent man. But, if you survive to do so... your brain will probably be very resilient. A woman, however, is much more likely to grow up to be intelligent but her brain has not suffered and recovered from the brain-damage that a boy's would have so she is therefore less-well equiped to recover from brain diseases late in life.
It could be that men with more neurons but fewer processes (the neurological kind not the CPU kind) have deeper cognitive ability over a narrower set of subjects and women who have fewer neurons over more processes have broader cognitive ability spread more shallowly across their faculties.
This feminine congruity can be seen as a benefit reaped from not having areas of their brains fried by testosterone. The masculine depth of focus can be seen as compensation for having lost breadth of cognitive ability. Both sexes suffer physical and mental ailments for the virtue of posessing their morphological differences. Brain morphology is just one area of difference. Field research has shown that women and men may have major anatomical differences of unknown functional nature.
Sony, you own a premium niche of the Home Theater market. I have noticed that PVRs are very popular. You have your own memory stick and could make your own specially copy protected memory sticks if you so desired. This means you could create a host of Sony brand media devices that would compliment each other. The experience of owning an "All Sony" house would mean a richer overall user experience full of Sony only features.
In example:
Create a PVR that can record movies and transcode them into PSP compatable format. Either the Sony PVR could have a PSP disc burner or you could use an augmented memory-stick with some kind of DRM in it that prevented copying from stick-to-stick.
Lower the PSP's price to drive sales of PSP-add-ons sold at hefty profits. Create a PS2 to PSP link, a PVR to PSP link, and a Sony Car Stereo to PSP link. Call it the Sony Media Bus.
Other ideas:
Create a bare-bones "movies only" PSP. Create PSP-variants that can be embedded in mini-vans that can load hours of video in memory sticks or PSP disks. Create Sony Jukebox applications to wirelessly sync PSP and PSP-Auto to you home PVR-Music-Station. Create PS1 and 2 emulation for the PSP. Digital Camera PSP, Cell phone PSP, PSP on a cracker...
Note: I wanted a MythTV plugin to do MP4 exports to a memory stick and track which shows I've watched on my PSP. Unfortunately, my kid is more likely to make use of a PSP than I am. So that means the PSP and PVR have to work together easily. He'll end up watching the shows on the bus so the unit will have to be cheap enough that it won't automatically get stolen. Is it possible to create an MP4 player for under $50?
Would you hire a Business Manager who knew nothing about business? Would you hire an Accounting manager who knew nothing about accounting?
Would you have a chief surgeon who never went to medical school? Would put a lead engineer over a bridge project who had never built a bridge? Would you have your multi-million dollar corporate head-quarters designed by a person who had no experience or training in designing anything?
Yet this kind of thing happens all the time in the IT world.
I don't get it. But, that's the way the world is for most people. I'm very lucky, I work for a very technically savvy and intelligent boss. But, I've been where you're at. You've only three choices really: suck-it-up, just move on, or stage a Coup D'etat.
If you need to be told how to stage a Coup D'etat then don't bother, you don't have the political skills to actually pull it off.
Slashdot Mirror
...is that it is speech. But it is speech unlike any speech that has ever been before. Never before has there been speech that one could speak into a machine and alter the reality of that machine. It is far more powerful than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater (that being an example of reasonably restricted speech) with the advent of the modern internet it seems silly to think that you can keep this powerful speech in a bottle and sell it. In many ways it is a bit like trying to put the genie back in the bottle...
Yet that's just what commerical software is all about. Bottling speech and selling it in crates. And there isn't anything wrong with that. That's what commerce is all about. Yet, things eventually become commodities and you lose that limited monopoly after a while. Just as light-bulbs are made by many companies now and some people would pause before buying a lamp that required a special light bulb.
Interestingly people buy lamps that require special bulbs... some times even bulbs that are patented and only made by one company. Some of these lamps provide brighter full-spectrum light, some provide a more pleasant shade of light. And other people find having a violet tinge in their light simply not worthy of the extra expense... and they buy lamps that take standard light bulbs.
I firmly believe that this will happen with software. And if you read the article you can garner the same points. Oracle buying OSS startups or Microsoft hiring off Distribution maintainers only causes a delay in the development of the inevitable. That delay is not without its profit margin. And the act of slowing the adoption of the OSS mind-set in the general public may be a necessary evil to allow humanity to adjust to this new powerful force on the face of the planet.
OpenSource empowers outsourcing in India and China as much as it empowers rural US and small European Universities. In time the natural market forces will shift finding a new balance in the world. Wages in India and China will equalize with those in the US. However, the rate of this shift can be controlled... I'm not sure if it is better to slow down or speed up this shift... but I know that those who are successful in today's world have an incentive to keep the world the same. Oracle and Microsoft for example did well in a world of bottled genies and they want that key to their success to stay the same. It is only natural.
OpenSource on the Internet means that someone who couldn't afford to do a thing before can now do that thing (see Nagios from the article) and leverage the talent of all the other people in the world who could not climb over that initial barrier to entry. OpenSource on the Internet means that the Software playing field is flatter. If you can get an OSS person to help you and you can afford their salary... you can do nearly the same thing as the really big companies. If the rest of your business runs well, technology need not be the biggest of your concerns.
Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have built their very lives on technology being a big concern. And all that cash they have means that they can sway the direction of technology onto paths that benefit themselves. Eventually, however, just as relationships with the light bulb maker doesn't drive the central concerns of most businesses today, neither will software in a hundred years.
In one hundred years what will matter is that this was a time of innovation that generated technology that changed the course of history. Just as pop. culture is confused about how much Edison really did to invent the light bulb and electrical grid they will also very likely decide that Bill Gates was the inventor of the Personal Computer and the Internet. With a little luck they will find it silly that we used to buy software in boxes. With even more luck they will find it a silly idea to pay for software at all and instead will have established a concept of "commissioning software" to be created by those talented in the "craft" an
Third, SHUT THE FUCK UP, not everything needs to be done with mozilla.
I disagree, I even floss with Mozilla.
Also, I'd pay real money to see the code for a program that used a serial device as datasource and XUL for display. If someone could do that reguardless of if they should or not... it'd be a hoot to see. Maybe we could write an FDISK interface in XUL. Now that would be too XUL for SKUL... err.. school.
If 99.999% of the world jumped off a bridge, would you do the same thing?
I'd go last. Everyone else would break my fall.
Ah, I missed the part about 25 keys. Too bad. I really liked the idea of having a keyboard that you could re-arrange at will.
Think Geek has this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/77ba/ A keyboard where you can tile the keys however you feel like. It's for gamers but I'm sure you could make it work for your purposes.
The Delta II can use up to 9 strap on rocket boosters in addition to the main main motor. This configuration has flown successfully for many years. If they try to make all 10 boosters controllable I could see them having problems (like the Soviet Moon rocket). If they just have a few motors for control and use the rest for boost it will probably be an easier task.
Thank you, that's very informative. The subtle difference is the idea of a control rocket versus a boost rocket. Boost rockets being easier to coordinate than individual control rockets. I wasn't aware of the difference... I'm just a computer geek.
from the article:
The spacecraft is expected to launch vertical atop a stack of about 10 Canadian Arrow rocket engines and land horizontally on an aircraft runway, they added.
If I remember my space history correctly, Russia had a moon rocket design that tried to incorporate the firing of 20 or more independant rocket motors. The design proved far too complex for the electronics of the day to coordinate and control.
With todays computer processing power I'll be interested to see if the problem of coordinating that many rocket motors simultaneously has become trivial enough to make a reliable launch vehicle.
IIRC: The old soviet rockets would spin out of control.
However, IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist).
Not pretty, but if space and processing power is truly at such a premium...
At this point I'll point out that the original poster was talking about deploying an entire HTTP server with HTML in the device. If it was even possible to do that, then we know the device was in a class that would allow such waste as an XML export. His idea of pushing HTML from his device to the browser is perhaps one of the single worst ideas I've ever heard. If this is a one off project that nobody cares about, then fine, but if anyone is going to have to live with this product... pushing HTML from an embedded device is a horrifically bad idea.
Text is beautiful in that it never suffers from endian or other platform issues. It is, however, larger and requires parsing. If you use the markup language you won't have to map the datagrams between Ada and C and Irix and Linux on the x86 in 12 years when your original embedded data source is still in use but your middle teir servers that parse the data source are utterly obsolete.
Text may cost more, but proper use of text would have saved at least one embedded system I know of. When we're talking about applications that will live decades and when we're talking about a system where an embedded HTTP server isn't outlandish... text makes sense. Text doesn't suffer from endian issues, cryptic formats, or the random undocumented datastructure.
There are reasons for each type of data representation, but, for this type of use text is king.
If we were really talking about a system with no networking on it then talking about XML would be silly, but no more silly than talking about an HTTP server on such a device. Never ever, ever never, never ever use a binary format to transmit data you're just going to plop on a web-page. Never embed an HTTP server and HTML documents onto a device if you can at all help it. If you find yourself stuffing HTML onto a device give yourself a way to do maintenance. Somebody might think your webpages are ugly.
So it sounds like most devices could read and write text now-a-days right? If that's so then maybe they could write text that was generically formatted into some kind of mark-up language... an ML. We want something really generic so let's call it "XML" and all this XML would do is represent a data structure. You would print it to a socket. So even if you had a very teeny tiny embedded device that at least could do networking, could at least use a couple of Kbytes of RAM that device's data structures could be read by another program. Perhaps a bigger heavier program living on a box with lots more space and more readily modified so the output could be "pretty printed" to a data browsing program of some kind.
Getting data back into the teeny weeny device could also be accomplished by reading data posted to the socket. So the idea here is that if you have an itsy bitsy teeny weeny device that is beefy enough to read and write to a socket on a networking infrastructure of some kind... then you could use a different system to produce UI things like web-pages.
The crazy idea here is: why not use XMLHTTP everywhere? DO NOT spend your time trying to make pretty webpages on an itsy bitsy device that will have your sloppy gawd-awful HTML burned into its firmware... instead make generic web-service interfaces that a real (tm) web person can hook into using some kind of XML service architecture.
Can he open a socket? Can he put characters to it? Can he read characters from it? Maybe 2 or 3 MB is too little to do that in. What do you need to read and write text? Maybe 128 MB or so?
You might consider a very minimal XML interface on top of a very very very simple HTTP server. Your UI could live on a completely different device on a completely different server... or on the same server in a different application stack. You could run your service on port 8080 or something if you didn't want to run it on 80 to prevent
You could display your state as a single XML document that is gotten at a single URL. Each setting could be manipulated by posting to a URL specified in the XML document. These sets of documents and post URLs could become a simple CGI set of interfaces you could describe for anything from webservers, application servers, or other web-aware C++ programs to hook into.
I guess the French have found a new way to save face.
I'm so ashamed, mod me down.
I for one welcome our new suit and tie wearing overlords.
:-0 *gasp*
Wait... that's not funny at all
Still very bleeding-edge, however, I have seen right-click examples on other sites and the point here is that of motivated you could approximate windows in simple HTML and Javascript. You're right. I can't find anyone actually using this anywhere... I've been working with Rico actually. But I keep an eye on Qooxdoo because its only a matter of time before someone tries to build a real app with this.
Besides QooxDoo and Rico fill different spaces in a complete Ajax application. QooxDoo is effects, Rico is communication.
If you have seen QooxDoo then you probably thought the same thing I did when you saw it: "Microsoft should be freaking out about this!" Later when I learned that AJAX comes from discarded Microsoft Technology I realized that Microsoft had pulled a Xerox. Just as Xerox threw away the chance to be the leader of Desktop Software and gave away the GUI and Mouse... Microsoft handed Google a lead. The problem is, this is Microsoft not Xerox we're talking about. Will Google keep that lead?
That Mars, what a swinger!
I for one welcome our new ...perpetuation of the running gag... overlords.
I installed Ubuntu on an old Compaq Laptop (a horrid old Presario) I have lying around and everything just worked! Even my Orinoco Wifi card just plain worked. Even Suspend just plain worked. I couldn't believe it. They're doing something right. I just hope Shuttleworth's profit model works out for him.
you know, thats a mighty big kid for seven. You might want to start saving money for groceries now... for when they're a teenager.
If you don't like the XML in Ajax, try JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). With JSON you can implement Ajax without all the XML bloat. Ajax is more about the Asynchronous than it is about the XML. So Ajax without the XML and with JSON is... AJAJ?
Single most important thing is to have enough displays. I can't imagine working in less than two displays. One display for code the other to monitor the code's results or read documentation.
.5 TB storage, DVD recorder, Dual headed Nvida card, GigE on the desktop, Dual flat panels, and a keyboard arm.
Seriously. Two displays. Code on the left, output on the right. Code left, query results right. Code left, webpage right. Code left, compiler and tests right. You see bugs on the right and make bug fixes on the left screen. You make bugs on the left screen and see them on the right screen.
My box is a linux box with VMware for those time you have to have windows or need to test alternate server configurations. I also have a personal copy of crossover office just so I can run Outlook and MSIE in KDE without booting the VMware machine. There are times in the development cycle when I never use VMware but I have to have Outlook everyday.
Otherwise I think I have a great setup Dual Xeons (shows 4 penguins/cpus at boot), a Gig of RAM,
If you've never used a Mouse/Keyboard arm get one. If your boss won't buy it for you get it for yourself. They run $250 but are worth every penny. The ability to float your keyboard to any position from sitting to standing is absolutely life-changing.
Only time in my life that my work computer has been far better than my home computers. Make me spend lots of time in the office. I bet that's why they buy me all these toys.
What about a magic plugin that'll make IE's version of JavaScript behave like Firefox (i.e. DOM compliant)?
... well ... an array.
If anybody ever finds this plug-in let me know. I'd like to be able to access my attributes array as
this report:
...male fetuses appear to involute fewer overproduced cortical neurons than females, this gender difference could explain in part the boys' greater functional impairments from early brain damage.
...any disease that causes neuronal loss could be expected to lead to more severe functional deficits in women due to their loss of more dendritic connections per neuron lost.
Due to the influx of testosterone early in development male fetuses often suffer damage to their brains. Specifically in the corpus callosum because the development of that region of the brain (which is the communications link between right and left hemispheres) coincides with the assertion of gender. This is manifested later during childhood by boys having poorer fine-motor control than girls of the same age. This early brain-damage may account for the statistically higher incidents of mental impairment in boys.
For all the insults their brains suffer early in life due to testosterone, the boys reap a larger brain with more brain-cells. Just as a person who repeatedly breaks their bones gets a heavier and stronger bone for their trouble... only the "strong" brain-cells survive and the brain is adapted to survive brain-damage better. While female's brains have not had to suffer as many insults. From the same article:
It would appear then, that it is much harder to grow up to be an intelligent man. But, if you survive to do so... your brain will probably be very resilient. A woman, however, is much more likely to grow up to be intelligent but her brain has not suffered and recovered from the brain-damage that a boy's would have so she is therefore less-well equiped to recover from brain diseases late in life.
It could be that men with more neurons but fewer processes (the neurological kind not the CPU kind) have deeper cognitive ability over a narrower set of subjects and women who have fewer neurons over more processes have broader cognitive ability spread more shallowly across their faculties.
This feminine congruity can be seen as a benefit reaped from not having areas of their brains fried by testosterone. The masculine depth of focus can be seen as compensation for having lost breadth of cognitive ability. Both sexes suffer physical and mental ailments for the virtue of posessing their morphological differences. Brain morphology is just one area of difference. Field research has shown that women and men may have major anatomical differences of unknown functional nature.
In a sentence: Men and Women are Different.
Sony, you own a premium niche of the Home Theater market. I have noticed that PVRs are very popular. You have your own memory stick and could make your own specially copy protected memory sticks if you so desired. This means you could create a host of Sony brand media devices that would compliment each other. The experience of owning an "All Sony" house would mean a richer overall user experience full of Sony only features.
In example:
Create a PVR that can record movies and transcode them into PSP compatable format. Either the Sony PVR could have a PSP disc burner or you could use an augmented memory-stick with some kind of DRM in it that prevented copying from stick-to-stick. Lower the PSP's price to drive sales of PSP-add-ons sold at hefty profits. Create a PS2 to PSP link, a PVR to PSP link, and a Sony Car Stereo to PSP link. Call it the Sony Media Bus.
Other ideas:
Create a bare-bones "movies only" PSP. Create PSP-variants that can be embedded in mini-vans that can load hours of video in memory sticks or PSP disks. Create Sony Jukebox applications to wirelessly sync PSP and PSP-Auto to you home PVR-Music-Station. Create PS1 and 2 emulation for the PSP. Digital Camera PSP, Cell phone PSP, PSP on a cracker...
Note: I wanted a MythTV plugin to do MP4 exports to a memory stick and track which shows I've watched on my PSP. Unfortunately, my kid is more likely to make use of a PSP than I am. So that means the PSP and PVR have to work together easily. He'll end up watching the shows on the bus so the unit will have to be cheap enough that it won't automatically get stolen. Is it possible to create an MP4 player for under $50?
Would you hire a Business Manager who knew nothing about business? Would you hire an Accounting manager who knew nothing about accounting? Would you have a chief surgeon who never went to medical school? Would put a lead engineer over a bridge project who had never built a bridge? Would you have your multi-million dollar corporate head-quarters designed by a person who had no experience or training in designing anything?
Yet this kind of thing happens all the time in the IT world.
I don't get it. But, that's the way the world is for most people. I'm very lucky, I work for a very technically savvy and intelligent boss. But, I've been where you're at. You've only three choices really: suck-it-up, just move on, or stage a Coup D'etat.
If you need to be told how to stage a Coup D'etat then don't bother, you don't have the political skills to actually pull it off.