I tend to agree, but then I look at Palm, which really did soldier on trying to push usability over features for some time. Where did it get them? Yeah, I'm bitter. Where can I get something with the battery life and small size of the Palm V I had 5 years ago? (Come to think of it, I would like it to have wireless, and a web browser, and... uh oh).
I think photorealism is the wrong objective, as it's too focused on still images. I think realism (not just photo-) is becoming less about what we've come to think of as "graphics power" (which is largely just fill rate), and more about physics and animation. IMO current graphics already look much better in a screenshot than when actually playing a game. It's when you shoot a rocket launcher at a building and the explosion dissapates without a trace that the virtual world becomes absurd.
I'm a devoted linux user, but let me disagree with one point... "just a driver layer." IMHO, device support is THE unsolvable problem for Linux. Too many devices are a crapshoot. Unless vendors ever open-source their drivers, which hasn't happened yet, users will never be able to assume they can buy a device and it will work, with all features supported, when they take it home and plug it in to their Linux box. Scouring message boards for clues about how well something might work before buying anything is a nagging pain I've learned to live with, but I doubt everybody else will.
Most (not all) of the windows OSS apps are inferior by leaps and bounds to the closed source alternatives. Firefox and Thunderbird are two obvious exceptions to that. Things like open source non-linear video editing solutions or graphics programs such as the gimp are really pretty lousy compared to some of the costly (or on rare occasion free) closed source alternatives.
Windows just doesn't have a culture of open source. You go to look for some silly little utility, and not only is it closed source, it's $18.95. In my limited past experience, the Mac is even worse - "here's an open source app dressed up with the native Mac widget set! Just $18.95!" Most of the good open source stuff for Windows is a port from Linux or somewhere else.
Actually I shouldn't say "silly little utility" - developers have a right to ask whatever they want for their stuff, and it's their own hard work that produced it. But as a user, it's sure nice to work on Linux without all those toll booths everywhere. You just say "apt-get install" or "emerge" or whatever and with any luck, you're done.
Who needs a GPU? Give me a 3D framebuffer and I'll play a FPS with each frame raytraced in real time.;-)
I don't think you need a smiley on that at all. The universe is really incredibly parallel. That's why it still takes a computer the size of a building to simulate the molecules in a thimble of water. If we ever want photorealism, we'll have to simulate many more physical phenomena than is currently common. And beyond light bouncing around (i.e. rendering), think about all the other physics our simulated worlds don't simulate. Simulated worlds are still horribly static and immutable. I say, bring on them cores!
Those running huge simulations and using far more than 2GB of RAM are not doing so on a desktop.
That's obviously because a desktop can't do the job. I run cluster jobs, and I assure you I'd prefer to run them on my laptop, if only I could put 100 cores in there.
We don't need eight cores, at least in the short-to-medium term, because it would require fundamentally rewriting all our software to be more parallel
I think that's somewhat of an exageration. Not all software has to be rewritten, just software where 1) speed is a driving concern and 2) isn't already multithreaded. In other words, normal office and web software doesn't need rewriting because it runs fine on 1 core. Raytracers and video effects software doesn't need rewriting because it's already multithreaded. That leaves things like games, where we would want multithreaded collision detection, physics engines, etc.
Ha!! As a Thinkpad devotee, I always knew black was the one and only best color for a laptop, somehow or other.
But seriously, this seems to be a persistent problem with Apple's nice-looking toys. They make the iPods shiny black, so every scratch stands out. They make clear cases so you can see all the dust bunnies inside. They make fresh, clean colors that only look good new. Me, I'm a realist. I buy barf-colored carpet for my living room just to be safe.
It's not limited to small clips. I think they're just saying "most people" will use it that way to evade the nagging issues of copyright infringement and competition with Apple.
So is this just a way for some other company to bootstrap off the iPod's success? Probably. On the other hand, small hard drives do cost a significant amount of money, so re-using the one a lot of people already own isn't totally stupid. Only about 85% stupid.
Which casts a huge megalith of doubt on their intentions. No profit driven enterprise would spend more on litigation than they expect to get in return - which is why, for example, car companies don't issue recalls for lemons if they expect to be able to settle for far less than a recall will cost.
I suppose the RIAA would argue that the intention of their lawsuits is not to get rich off the settlements, but to curb piracy thus driving up legitimate music sales long term.
Open source PVR technology. Problem is, next generation HDMI / Blue Ray / HD DVD won't let you save DRM material to your HD (AFAIK).
I might be wrong, but I believe the technology still allows a plain old 640x480 analog signal to be exported. I'll accept that tradeoff if I have to, but in that case I also won't be shelling out for a high-def TV any time soon.
But maybe you're saying people are only entitled to what they earn? But that's not true either. It's perfectly legal to get rich by marriage, or inheritance, or natural resources, or dumb luck, or off the work of others. For instance, the coastal states just negotiated themselves
$69,000,000,000 in oil revenues, for oil extracted outside their borders (in the Gulf of Mexico). Are they entitled to this found money? They will be, legally, if the bill passes.
I would think the first impact would be for advertisers to demand lower prices, since they'll be able to say that their ads aren't hitting as many eyeballs as the content providers thought they did.
That will lead to the content providers going after the distributors (cable/satellite) to make up for the shortfall.
I don't think it works that way. When you put up a used car for sale, do you charge however much money you "need"? Of course not, you charge however much you think you can get. They don't put more or fewer ads in a show (or raise or lower the cable bill) because they "need" money, they're simply trying to maximize revenue - the point at which the extra number of ads is negated by reduced viewership.
Personally, I'm not so sure ad-supported content is the way to go. I already pay the cable co. plenty of money, so I don't feel obliged to watch ads. If it turns out that my $70 / month buys 60 pay-per-views instead of 110 channels of commercials, so be it.
Let's get real for a moment. Linux has become popular on servers for the same reason Java did, i.e. it generated a lot of press buzz, and has companies like IBM and HP pushing it to their customers (which they call "partners" to make things look cosy and pally).
More specifically, because both IBM and HP push it - the same code base - instead of both making it into incompatible proprietary products, as happened to the BSD variants. All of your reasons, i.e. "everybody has heard of it," are compatible with that theory, if you look just one level deeper. Stop spending all your effort arguing against what nobody claimed - that Linux is more popular because people are emotionally attached to the GPL.
We can argue about what "free" means all day, but OpenDarwin is a good example of why Linux adoption has left the BSDs in the dust - because the viral nature of the GPL binds all the users and contributors of Linux together (like the Borg:) I'm sure there are some days on which RedHat wishes they could fork off and go it alone, but nope, they can't.
Do all the packages in Ubuntu support amd64, or just "most of the popular ones"? What I would expect Debian is comprehensive support by all packages in Debian.
notice I avoid any discussion of h/w, because in the enterprise, h/w without support is worthless.
Yes, Vyatta talks a good game, but 24/7 worldwide support isn't something you build with a few million bucks in VC funding.
This sounds eerily like old Sun talk. "We don't care if competing products can do it for less, we're [Sun | SGI | Cray]!! The low end will never catch up with us, because we have special pixie dust!"
The whole point of this case is that neither the corp. neither the govt. has to tell you what they're doing. Good luck with your free market remedy under those circumstances.
It seems to me that memory size has plateaued. 1 GB was fairly big, but feasible 4 or 5 years ago. I just checked Compusa's website, and it looks like 1 GB of RAM is exactly the same price it was 2 years ago. And many mainstream systems are still shipping with 256 megabytes, which is pathetic but has been standard for about 4 years now, it seems to me.
States are only "artificial" if you have no concept of American history and have never traveled through the United States. People from other countries don't understand regional or state-specific differences in the U.S.
In 1776 there were only 13 states. This means the United States is older than the vast majority of individual states. How can you rationalize the electoral college on something as specific as state history, when most of the state history that matters now hadn't even occurred when the system was devised?
It is centralized power that is far more prone to abuse than decentralized power--that should be obvious.
...and the electoral college is clearly more centralized than the popular vote. Nobody is talking about dissolving states' self-determination, only making individuals' votes count equally in national elections.
So you want millions of uninformed uncaring citizens to start determining national policy? The solution is to education people so that they want to vote, not force people to vote on things they know nothing about.
I have personal opinions and think I'm pretty well informed, but my attendance record at the polls is spotty. Why? Because one vote doesn't matter. There is absolutely 0% chance that my single vote will sway the Presidential election, because they can't even count within that margin of error, and if the vote is that close it comes down to procedural rulings anyways (as demonstrated in 2000).
Do I know that the entire system would collapse if everybody thought that and stopped voting entirely? Sure. But I only control my own vote, and I know it doesn't matter.
It's the same reason you have to legislate things like pollution controls. Otherwise even rational environmentalists would still pollute, since the emissions from your tailpipe alone will never matter. What matters is whether the masses polute, and to affect that you need laws.
the State (meaning the government at some level) requires that one to be the sole monopoly provider. Numerous regulations, restrictions, licensing and mandates prevent competition.
I don't believe that's why. I think it's because it's simply not practical to have 2 (or N) parallel network infrastructures.
In other words, they got it wrong. To "predict" that *eventually* you'd be able to see as well as hear people, after the invention of TV, is most unimpressive. But it would have been somewhat interesting had they managed to predict that hardly anybody would want it, and why.
Similarly, I doubt the human race will choose to place computers in charge of everything, or re-engineer ourselves beyond recognition, any time in our or our children's lifetimes.
I also don't believe the basic premise of the singularity, which is that life changes exponentially because technology builds on itself. Look at medicine. The first few really significant breakthroughs, like penicillin, were stupid simple and had a bigger effect than anything that's happened since. Making progress gets harder and harder. Our accumulation of facts is exponential, but those facts have a diminishing return.
"Software Suspend" alone is a bit alarming with no mention of suspend-to-ram (which is much faster). There are many little gotchas. For instance my T40 can suspend to RAM and last for days using APM. When I switched to ACPI, my battery runtime when up substantially, but suspend-to-ram (though it appears to work and shuts of the screen) works poorly, hardly saving any more energy than just shutting the lid. I am not saying that Windows is any better, but I have never seen all the features on a laptop actually work properly, if you count docking/undocking etc. (I suppose this is where some Mac evangelists may chime in...)
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I tend to agree, but then I look at Palm, which really did soldier on trying to push usability over features for some time. Where did it get them? Yeah, I'm bitter. Where can I get something with the battery life and small size of the Palm V I had 5 years ago? (Come to think of it, I would like it to have wireless, and a web browser, and... uh oh).
I think photorealism is the wrong objective, as it's too focused on still images. I think realism (not just photo-) is becoming less about what we've come to think of as "graphics power" (which is largely just fill rate), and more about physics and animation. IMO current graphics already look much better in a screenshot than when actually playing a game. It's when you shoot a rocket launcher at a building and the explosion dissapates without a trace that the virtual world becomes absurd.
I'm a devoted linux user, but let me disagree with one point... "just a driver layer." IMHO, device support is THE unsolvable problem for Linux. Too many devices are a crapshoot. Unless vendors ever open-source their drivers, which hasn't happened yet, users will never be able to assume they can buy a device and it will work, with all features supported, when they take it home and plug it in to their Linux box. Scouring message boards for clues about how well something might work before buying anything is a nagging pain I've learned to live with, but I doubt everybody else will.
Actually I shouldn't say "silly little utility" - developers have a right to ask whatever they want for their stuff, and it's their own hard work that produced it. But as a user, it's sure nice to work on Linux without all those toll booths everywhere. You just say "apt-get install" or "emerge" or whatever and with any luck, you're done.
But seriously, this seems to be a persistent problem with Apple's nice-looking toys. They make the iPods shiny black, so every scratch stands out. They make clear cases so you can see all the dust bunnies inside. They make fresh, clean colors that only look good new. Me, I'm a realist. I buy barf-colored carpet for my living room just to be safe.
So is this just a way for some other company to bootstrap off the iPod's success? Probably. On the other hand, small hard drives do cost a significant amount of money, so re-using the one a lot of people already own isn't totally stupid. Only about 85% stupid.
Hahahaha. Oh, that's golden. I couldn't have made up a more lawyerly and selfish resonse. 0% for the artists, straight from the horse's mouth.
But maybe you're saying people are only entitled to what they earn? But that's not true either. It's perfectly legal to get rich by marriage, or inheritance, or natural resources, or dumb luck, or off the work of others. For instance, the coastal states just negotiated themselves $69,000,000,000 in oil revenues, for oil extracted outside their borders (in the Gulf of Mexico). Are they entitled to this found money? They will be, legally, if the bill passes.
Personally, I'm not so sure ad-supported content is the way to go. I already pay the cable co. plenty of money, so I don't feel obliged to watch ads. If it turns out that my $70 / month buys 60 pay-per-views instead of 110 channels of commercials, so be it.
We can argue about what "free" means all day, but OpenDarwin is a good example of why Linux adoption has left the BSDs in the dust - because the viral nature of the GPL binds all the users and contributors of Linux together (like the Borg :) I'm sure there are some days on which RedHat wishes they could fork off and go it alone, but nope, they can't.
Do all the packages in Ubuntu support amd64, or just "most of the popular ones"? What I would expect Debian is comprehensive support by all packages in Debian.
It seems to me that memory size has plateaued. 1 GB was fairly big, but feasible 4 or 5 years ago. I just checked Compusa's website, and it looks like 1 GB of RAM is exactly the same price it was 2 years ago. And many mainstream systems are still shipping with 256 megabytes, which is pathetic but has been standard for about 4 years now, it seems to me.
Do I know that the entire system would collapse if everybody thought that and stopped voting entirely? Sure. But I only control my own vote, and I know it doesn't matter.
It's the same reason you have to legislate things like pollution controls. Otherwise even rational environmentalists would still pollute, since the emissions from your tailpipe alone will never matter. What matters is whether the masses polute, and to affect that you need laws.
Similarly, I doubt the human race will choose to place computers in charge of everything, or re-engineer ourselves beyond recognition, any time in our or our children's lifetimes.
I also don't believe the basic premise of the singularity, which is that life changes exponentially because technology builds on itself. Look at medicine. The first few really significant breakthroughs, like penicillin, were stupid simple and had a bigger effect than anything that's happened since. Making progress gets harder and harder. Our accumulation of facts is exponential, but those facts have a diminishing return.
"Software Suspend" alone is a bit alarming with no mention of suspend-to-ram (which is much faster). There are many little gotchas. For instance my T40 can suspend to RAM and last for days using APM. When I switched to ACPI, my battery runtime when up substantially, but suspend-to-ram (though it appears to work and shuts of the screen) works poorly, hardly saving any more energy than just shutting the lid. I am not saying that Windows is any better, but I have never seen all the features on a laptop actually work properly, if you count docking/undocking etc. (I suppose this is where some Mac evangelists may chime in...)