People don't use high-end computers for game playing much anymore (slashdot crown excepted, I'm sure). Why would they when they can get a game console for a couple hundred bucks? It fills practically the same need, but much much cheaper, and also works extremely reliably.
There may be a few 3D game nuts out there who absolutely must have the latest PC in order to play the games they want and have the money to purchase that PC, but that is a tiny minority. For most people, spending 10X as much or more on PC game hardware (versus a console) does not result in 10X the fun.
Frankly, I have zero pity for the self-indulgent wealthy fools who purchase high-end PCs for the express purpose of playing games on them. It's their money I guess, but what a waste.
Rather arguing with you directly, I instead cite the
Google
zeitgeist from September 2002, the most recent one I could find with operating system data. You are not far off, most computers run Win98, but even Mac OS has got Win95 beat.
Actually, there are people alive today who can do that. I've seen it done. Most of the people with this level of ability make a decent living as musical performers of some kind or other, if not composers or conductors.
The reason that they don't use their abilities to duplicate the copyrighted material that the music industry holds so dear is because this material is artistically worthless to them.
On the linksys there is another option, Block WAN Request, that locks down all machines on the intranet behind it pretty effectively. The only connections allowed are those that originate from inside the LAN.
I don't remember if it is turned on by default. Settings are saved through firmware upgrades and it has been a long time since I bought my router.
Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?
I see you believe that we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 40 years. As you well know, when the supply of some commodity becomes scarcer while demand stays the same or increases, the price of the commodity will rise. Therefore, in 40 years, the price of fossil fuels should be extremely high as the supply dwindles and demand increases.
I am willing to make a bet with you. The bet is this - the price of a barrel of crude in 40 years will be lower than it is now (adjusted for inflation). That is correct, I am betting that the supply of fossil fuels will actually increase faster than the demand in the future. How will this happen? Simple. Oil companies only explore for oil when the current supply starts to run out, becaues exploration is costly. There is an enormous supply of oil at various places in the earth's crust that we do not know about yet. The known, proven reserves of oil are much smaller than the actual existing reserves. Extraction techniques to obtain this oil may not exist yet, but they will be developed as technology improves.
This has been going on ever since people began drilling oil in Pennsylvania in the 1880s. That is correct, the price of a barrel of crude (adjusted for inflation) has been falling ever since that time. I am very confident that it will continue to do so, so confident that I am willing to bet $10,000. If 40 years is too long to wait, I would happily consent to 20 years.
Mock me all you want, but there is no valid empirical data to support the theory that we will run out of fossil fuels. If you or anyone else thinks I am wrong, please accept my bet.
You misunderstood considerably my 'scrolltop' idea, I think because it is hard to describe. The screen is supposed to have a rigid piece on the end (think so you can pull the screen out of the scroll). Once it was pulled out - this is an important part - rigid braces would fold out of the base of the scroll and attach to the rigid piece at the top of the screen, thus forming a square to support the screen.
The base of the scroll is supposed to have adjustable feet to prevent the thing from rolling away when closed and to stabilize it when the screen is out and up. Really, I intended for people to use this device is a screen-keyboard configuration that is very similar to current laptops. Therefore the screen and keyboard would not come out at opposite ends of the scroll, but instead at closer to a 90 degree angle.
See what I mean now? It is just like a laptop, except it rolls into a scroll, and has some extra uses, like writing on the screen with a digital pen, retaining images on the screen after it turned off, etc.
Size would make or break this thing - if it were significantly more compact than modern laptops when rolled up it might be nice. But this is just a silly idea.
What I said was not so much an analogy as an invitation to use your imagination. Admittedly, it is much harder to make a roll-up screen than a keyboard. However, a monitor that shared many of the properties of paper would obviously be useful. Flexible monitors are not ludicrous like a drivable blender and your other mockeries.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb a little and say that such technology will be invented during my lifetime. I have a while yet to live after all.
If you do use this for playing Quake 3, just make sure you're on the blue team.
Don't you mean that you should be on the red team? After all, with your description above, it would be really easy to see the blue team to target them using this monitor, while seeing red targets would be hard. Now if members of the blue team were using this monitor too, they would have a hard time seeing you, thereby increasing the red advantage even more!
What I want is e-paper, paper that can be written on digitally, by people with the proper pens and machines with the proper hardware. This sounds a lot like a step in that direction.
My idea for the use of this paper is for notebook computers to be like scrolls. Initially just a tube, you pull out the screen which is rolled up inside (and has a rigid piece across the top), and unfold two braces (on both sides) to hold it in place.
They already have keyboards that you can roll up, why not screens? The scroll-book would do the same thing to store the keyboard as with the screen.
Persistence of images when the power goes off is a big requirement for digital paper. But I'm waiting for the scroll-book, which please note could double as a book and notebook if you could write on it with a digital pen. Don't unfurl the keyboard if you don't want to type into it.
My major clue is that the install process seems to still require the making of a 1.44" boot floppy. That is, if you want to run it by itself, outside of another OS.
To me this speaks volumes about just how old it really is, and probably indicates it is never going to be updated to modern hardware. Also, what makes it relevant in this day and age? Can it do anything another system cannot do better? If the answer is no, or even an extravagantly technical yes (which would never matter to most users), then the world has passed it by.
The impact of BeOS was probably like Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. He lost, but got a large enough percentage of the vote to scare the mainstream politicians into sharpening up their act. I think this is arguably one of the factors for the prosperity of the 1990s. If I am correct, we can thank BeOS for encouraging other software makers to improve their quality/performance. Therefore BeOS benefits us even now, but we do not get the benefit from actually using it.
"With Rendevous they encourage streaming version of MP3 and video sharing"
Pardon me for being picky, but aren't you describing features that have not yet been released? Rendezvous doesn't seem to do much of anything now, with the exception of the nifty iChat.
I am fairly certain Apple has more uses planned for it in the future though.
I'm curious. If you invent something in Japan, can you patent it first in, say, America, or any other place that you may not happen to live? And would it help you if you did? By 'help' I mean perhaps have a chance at realizing some personal gains from your intellectual property.
Some ideas can be based upon new discovery of universal scientific truths. One would think that where the person who had an idea like this resided would be less important than in many other issues of law. Especially if there was a potential market in the location where the inventor patented it.
This is an extremely odd choice of words. I would have used 'cooperative', wouldn't you? I wonder if their intent was to conjure up another commun- word. We may never know.
"You may be surprised to know that in 2000 years of indian civilisation, India has never ever attacked another nation."
Which is not to say India has never ever engaged in war. I guess attacking another nation during war is ok. Another thing that makes war completely ok is to not recognize the entity that you are fighting as a nation. I like the rest of your comment. Unfortunately I believe all nations are guilty of engaging in violence at sometime in their history, and not always for moral reasons. Saying that a nation never started a fight is at worst lying, and at best a glib attempt to justify violence.
Although India does not seem to be interested in building a world empire, things would be better if they could just leave Pakistan and Kashmir alone. I have heard too much rhetoric justifying violence in those regions.
Wow, sounds great, but I have to ask, do YOU actually use one? I have heard, in addition to the positive aspects you list, they are quite difficult to push...
I remember reading a magazine article about this earlier. My impression was that they are in the extremely early planning stages of any such endeavor. The idea of basing all their cars around a common chassis and powertrain sounds like an amazing way to reduced production costs all by itself, even without the fuel cells. Still, I am not holding my breath. The article I read quoted GM execs as saying something like, "We will make a decision on this around 2008-10." Sounds like they have a political interest in announcing this now. They probably want to avoid having the government force them into making fuel cell cars, and the best way to do that is to pretend they are already working on them.
I'm sorry, how did you come to the conclusion that there are less than 50000 4-note melodies? When I think about this, I consider that this number depends on the tonal system and the rythmic figuration. The latter condition guarantees that there are actually an infinite number of 4-note melodies, even if the former does not. Legally, I suppose the question would be the number of melodies that people could distinguish as being different. This number depends on the person and is probably higher than you think. People with absolute pitch consider the same melody or even the same motive played at two different pitch level to be quite different, for instance.
But that does not make it unoriginal. Most Western music for the past 400 years has been created using the same essential building blocks. An infinite number of works can be made using this system. All the sounds, rythyms, etc may have existed before, and may have been used in another work before, but that does not mean entirely new combinations cannot be created. What you say is akin to dismissing a painting as unoriginal because the artist used the color red.
Once again, you fail to get your meaning across. "The majority of intellectuals on SlashDot do not care of modding"? What does that mean?? Since you did this twice I'm just going to ascribe this phenomena to poor English language skills and not deliberate attempts at obfuscation. Remember kids, the majority of intellectuals on Slashdot do not care of modding too much of what is not.
This equation says it all. I bundle both want and need into desire. All that is left is accounting for how these numbers are likely to change over time. See? If your desire for an improved computer will rapidly go down as still better ones are introduced, you should keep your current one (level of consumption) in order to increase your happiness. Eventually, it is likely that your desire will increase as vastly better machines with new features, etc, come out and at that point you will have to make a purchase to increase your happiness, or maintain the same level. Ultimately this all depends on the individual. This is probably not the specific answer the questioner sought, so I would also advise Thursday as a mighty fine technology buyin' day.
Expressed, shall we say, interestingly? This is the second strangest post I have ever seen on slashdot. The strangest ever had been replied to, "Did anyone else read this as 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously'?" This is a reference to Naom Chomsky, who constructed that sentence to prove that is was possible to create language that was syntactically correct and meaningless. This however, is much more surreal than that. "Too much of what is not?" Right, a buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor, and says "Make me one with everything." The hot dog vendor complies, and says, "That will be $5." The buddhist hands him a twenty and takes his hot dog. Then he waits for a while. Finally he asks, "Where is my change?" The vendor intones, "Change is within." The buddhist nods and walks away. THAT is too much of what is not, my friends. This is SO getting modded down... I wish I had some links to that other post that was really strange. By now this post is becoming a candidate for a pretty strange post, all by itself.
Well, great that they found the first smiley, but I will not be satisfied until I see the LAST one. Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing. Now that people have apparently lost this ability, they use a crude text representation of a facial expression. This is not an improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't use high-end computers for game playing much anymore (slashdot crown excepted, I'm sure). Why would they when they can get a game console for a couple hundred bucks? It fills practically the same need, but much much cheaper, and also works extremely reliably.
There may be a few 3D game nuts out there who absolutely must have the latest PC in order to play the games they want and have the money to purchase that PC, but that is a tiny minority. For most people, spending 10X as much or more on PC game hardware (versus a console) does not result in 10X the fun.
Frankly, I have zero pity for the self-indulgent wealthy fools who purchase high-end PCs for the express purpose of playing games on them. It's their money I guess, but what a waste.
Rather arguing with you directly, I instead cite the Google zeitgeist from September 2002, the most recent one I could find with operating system data. You are not far off, most computers run Win98, but even Mac OS has got Win95 beat.
Actually, there are people alive today who can do that. I've seen it done. Most of the people with this level of ability make a decent living as musical performers of some kind or other, if not composers or conductors. The reason that they don't use their abilities to duplicate the copyrighted material that the music industry holds so dear is because this material is artistically worthless to them.
On the linksys there is another option, Block WAN Request, that locks down all machines on the intranet behind it pretty effectively. The only connections allowed are those that originate from inside the LAN.
I don't remember if it is turned on by default. Settings are saved through firmware upgrades and it has been a long time since I bought my router.
Someone on macslash (first post I believe) question why anyone would care about ogg. I think that question bears repeating. What is so great about ogg that would make people want to use it instead of mp3?
I see you believe that we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 40 years. As you well know, when the supply of some commodity becomes scarcer while demand stays the same or increases, the price of the commodity will rise. Therefore, in 40 years, the price of fossil fuels should be extremely high as the supply dwindles and demand increases.
I am willing to make a bet with you. The bet is this - the price of a barrel of crude in 40 years will be lower than it is now (adjusted for inflation). That is correct, I am betting that the supply of fossil fuels will actually increase faster than the demand in the future. How will this happen? Simple. Oil companies only explore for oil when the current supply starts to run out, becaues exploration is costly. There is an enormous supply of oil at various places in the earth's crust that we do not know about yet. The known, proven reserves of oil are much smaller than the actual existing reserves. Extraction techniques to obtain this oil may not exist yet, but they will be developed as technology improves.
This has been going on ever since people began drilling oil in Pennsylvania in the 1880s. That is correct, the price of a barrel of crude (adjusted for inflation) has been falling ever since that time. I am very confident that it will continue to do so, so confident that I am willing to bet $10,000. If 40 years is too long to wait, I would happily consent to 20 years.
Mock me all you want, but there is no valid empirical data to support the theory that we will run out of fossil fuels. If you or anyone else thinks I am wrong, please accept my bet.
You misunderstood considerably my 'scrolltop' idea, I think because it is hard to describe. The screen is supposed to have a rigid piece on the end (think so you can pull the screen out of the scroll). Once it was pulled out - this is an important part - rigid braces would fold out of the base of the scroll and attach to the rigid piece at the top of the screen, thus forming a square to support the screen.
The base of the scroll is supposed to have adjustable feet to prevent the thing from rolling away when closed and to stabilize it when the screen is out and up. Really, I intended for people to use this device is a screen-keyboard configuration that is very similar to current laptops. Therefore the screen and keyboard would not come out at opposite ends of the scroll, but instead at closer to a 90 degree angle.
See what I mean now? It is just like a laptop, except it rolls into a scroll, and has some extra uses, like writing on the screen with a digital pen, retaining images on the screen after it turned off, etc.
Size would make or break this thing - if it were significantly more compact than modern laptops when rolled up it might be nice. But this is just a silly idea.
What I said was not so much an analogy as an invitation to use your imagination. Admittedly, it is much harder to make a roll-up screen than a keyboard. However, a monitor that shared many of the properties of paper would obviously be useful. Flexible monitors are not ludicrous like a drivable blender and your other mockeries.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb a little and say that such technology will be invented during my lifetime. I have a while yet to live after all.
Don't you mean that you should be on the red team? After all, with your description above, it would be really easy to see the blue team to target them using this monitor, while seeing red targets would be hard. Now if members of the blue team were using this monitor too, they would have a hard time seeing you, thereby increasing the red advantage even more!
What I want is e-paper, paper that can be written on digitally, by people with the proper pens and machines with the proper hardware. This sounds a lot like a step in that direction.
My idea for the use of this paper is for notebook computers to be like scrolls. Initially just a tube, you pull out the screen which is rolled up inside (and has a rigid piece across the top), and unfold two braces (on both sides) to hold it in place.
They already have keyboards that you can roll up, why not screens? The scroll-book would do the same thing to store the keyboard as with the screen.
Persistence of images when the power goes off is a big requirement for digital paper. But I'm waiting for the scroll-book, which please note could double as a book and notebook if you could write on it with a digital pen. Don't unfurl the keyboard if you don't want to type into it.
My major clue is that the install process seems to still require the making of a 1.44" boot floppy. That is, if you want to run it by itself, outside of another OS.
To me this speaks volumes about just how old it really is, and probably indicates it is never going to be updated to modern hardware. Also, what makes it relevant in this day and age? Can it do anything another system cannot do better? If the answer is no, or even an extravagantly technical yes (which would never matter to most users), then the world has passed it by.
The impact of BeOS was probably like Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. He lost, but got a large enough percentage of the vote to scare the mainstream politicians into sharpening up their act. I think this is arguably one of the factors for the prosperity of the 1990s. If I am correct, we can thank BeOS for encouraging other software makers to improve their quality/performance. Therefore BeOS benefits us even now, but we do not get the benefit from actually using it.
Actually, IIRC, 10.2 uses bash as the default shell now. Even if I am wrong, it is now trivial to enable it since it is included in /bin as of 10.2
"With Rendevous they encourage streaming version of MP3 and video sharing"
Pardon me for being picky, but aren't you describing features that have not yet been released? Rendezvous doesn't seem to do much of anything now, with the exception of the nifty iChat.
I am fairly certain Apple has more uses planned for it in the future though.
I'm curious. If you invent something in Japan, can you patent it first in, say, America, or any other place that you may not happen to live? And would it help you if you did? By 'help' I mean perhaps have a chance at realizing some personal gains from your intellectual property.
Some ideas can be based upon new discovery of universal scientific truths. One would think that where the person who had an idea like this resided would be less important than in many other issues of law. Especially if there was a potential market in the location where the inventor patented it.
Patents are so complicated.
"communitarian spirit"?
This is an extremely odd choice of words. I would have used 'cooperative', wouldn't you? I wonder if their intent was to conjure up another commun- word. We may never know.
"You may be surprised to know that in 2000 years of indian civilisation, India has never ever attacked another nation."
Which is not to say India has never ever engaged in war. I guess attacking another nation during war is ok. Another thing that makes war completely ok is to not recognize the entity that you are fighting as a nation. I like the rest of your comment. Unfortunately I believe all nations are guilty of engaging in violence at sometime in their history, and not always for moral reasons. Saying that a nation never started a fight is at worst lying, and at best a glib attempt to justify violence.
Although India does not seem to be interested in building a world empire, things would be better if they could just leave Pakistan and Kashmir alone. I have heard too much rhetoric justifying violence in those regions.
Wow, sounds great, but I have to ask, do YOU actually use one? I have heard, in addition to the positive aspects you list, they are quite difficult to push...
Yep, that is the article all right. Slashdot is an amazing meta-medium!
I remember reading a magazine article about this earlier. My impression was that they are in the extremely early planning stages of any such endeavor. The idea of basing all their cars around a common chassis and powertrain sounds like an amazing way to reduced production costs all by itself, even without the fuel cells. Still, I am not holding my breath. The article I read quoted GM execs as saying something like, "We will make a decision on this around 2008-10." Sounds like they have a political interest in announcing this now. They probably want to avoid having the government force them into making fuel cell cars, and the best way to do that is to pretend they are already working on them.
I'm sorry, how did you come to the conclusion that there are less than 50000 4-note melodies? When I think about this, I consider that this number depends on the tonal system and the rythmic figuration. The latter condition guarantees that there are actually an infinite number of 4-note melodies, even if the former does not. Legally, I suppose the question would be the number of melodies that people could distinguish as being different. This number depends on the person and is probably higher than you think. People with absolute pitch consider the same melody or even the same motive played at two different pitch level to be quite different, for instance.
But that does not make it unoriginal. Most Western music for the past 400 years has been created using the same essential building blocks. An infinite number of works can be made using this system. All the sounds, rythyms, etc may have existed before, and may have been used in another work before, but that does not mean entirely new combinations cannot be created. What you say is akin to dismissing a painting as unoriginal because the artist used the color red.
Once again, you fail to get your meaning across. "The majority of intellectuals on SlashDot do not care of modding"? What does that mean?? Since you did this twice I'm just going to ascribe this phenomena to poor English language skills and not deliberate attempts at obfuscation. Remember kids, the majority of intellectuals on Slashdot do not care of modding too much of what is not.
This equation says it all. I bundle both want and need into desire. All that is left is accounting for how these numbers are likely to change over time. See? If your desire for an improved computer will rapidly go down as still better ones are introduced, you should keep your current one (level of consumption) in order to increase your happiness. Eventually, it is likely that your desire will increase as vastly better machines with new features, etc, come out and at that point you will have to make a purchase to increase your happiness, or maintain the same level. Ultimately this all depends on the individual. This is probably not the specific answer the questioner sought, so I would also advise Thursday as a mighty fine technology buyin' day.
Expressed, shall we say, interestingly? This is the second strangest post I have ever seen on slashdot. The strangest ever had been replied to, "Did anyone else read this as 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously'?" This is a reference to Naom Chomsky, who constructed that sentence to prove that is was possible to create language that was syntactically correct and meaningless. This however, is much more surreal than that. "Too much of what is not?" Right, a buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor, and says "Make me one with everything." The hot dog vendor complies, and says, "That will be $5." The buddhist hands him a twenty and takes his hot dog. Then he waits for a while. Finally he asks, "Where is my change?" The vendor intones, "Change is within." The buddhist nods and walks away. THAT is too much of what is not, my friends. This is SO getting modded down... I wish I had some links to that other post that was really strange. By now this post is becoming a candidate for a pretty strange post, all by itself.
Well, great that they found the first smiley, but I will not be satisfied until I see the LAST one. Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing. Now that people have apparently lost this ability, they use a crude text representation of a facial expression. This is not an improvement.