So, what fundamental advances are currently being worked on? What are we funding now that we should see 20 years down the road?
Don't you get it? Something isn't "fundamental" until it turns out to be useful down the road. Even the basic tenets of information theory were at first just formalisms of what people were figuring out about telegraphy. If we all knew exactly what would turn out to be useful, there wouldn't be any such thing as "research," it would all be "development."
Plus the LCD image is sharp and has perfect geometry. I don't think anything beats a decent LCD hooked up with DVI for coding and most office work (and browsing slashdot). (I can't speak for other applications because those are my only applications).
I doubt movies formatted for the little PSP with it's 480x272 screen would be popular targets for piracy. Especially when the movies are already released as DVD's which are presumably much higher quality and easy to rip.
The most common complaint I've heard is that Gimp is limited to 24 bpp RGB colorspace.
Does that matter? Well, it does to some.
A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)
However I think the single biggest boon to Gimp would be if Adobe found a way to stop PhotoShop piracy, and chose to do so.
The question is not whether p2p'ing shows will be legal (it won't). The question is whether p2p itself will be legal, just as the Bemax question was whether VCRs would be legal.
From the article:
the case raises a question of critical importance at the border between copyright and innovation: When should the distributor of a multi-purpose tool be held liable for the infringements that may be committed by end-users of the tool?
in Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (a.k.a. the "Sony Betamax ruling") held that a distributor cannot be held liable for users' infringement so long as the tool is capable of substantial noninfringing uses. In MGM v. Grokster, the Ninth Circuit found that P2P file-sharing software is capable of, and is in fact being used for, noninfringing uses. Relying on the Betamax precedent, the court ruled that the distributors of Grokster and Morpheus software cannot be held liable for users' copyright violations. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December 2004 the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
I suppose Telekom Austria will eventually exempt traffic for their web TV services from the monthly limit, as it is within their network.
This does make perfect sense, since Telekom Austria's measly bandwidth allowance is probably related to their costs for trans-Atlantic bandwidth.
But on the other hand, this would amount to charging "long distance" on the Internet - one rate for local connections, and a higher rate for everywhere else. Is that a can of worms we want to open?
Nobody can say for sure, but I doubt it. I think a very lucky person born any time in the past in a stable society could have lived for 90 years. Today we have drastically increased the percentage of people who live about that long, and thus increased "longevity." But I don't think we've extended the maximum much at all. If you tracked the record for "longest lifetime to date" over the past 1000 years, I doubt it has increased by even 25%.
I think things are changing so fast now, that even 10-15 years into the future is almost inscrutable unless you're making very broad generalizations.
I'm not so sure about that. 10 years ago the cool thing was... the Internet. Has anything really changed in the last 10 years? Jurassic Park as a special effects feature now 12 years old, and it doesn't look particularly out of date.
My own theory of scientific progress is that while facts and theories proliferate exponentially, they tend to diminish in significance at the same rate. When a field is new, it's easy to make breakthroughs. As it matures, most of the big ideas have been thought but there are armies of people churning out lots of paper.
Look at medical research; the most significant breakthoughs were the easiest to make - like penicillin. Now we're pouring billions into Cancer year after year and making a little progress. Longevity and quality of life are not increasing exponentially.
Look at transportation, rockets and jets were invented 60 years ago and since then nothing has supplanted them. Passenger jets don't look much different from 40 years ago. Cars haven't changed fundamentally in approximately one lifetime.
I'm not saying change has ceased, only that I'm not sure things are really changing any faster now than they were a couple hundred years ago. Some poeple think we're accelerating ever faster towards an incomprehensible future with no continuity, I don't think so.
Technology is going to progress, and by 2015 we'll have neat stuff, and by 2215 we'll have even neater stuff.
By 2215 "we" will all be dead.
As for Windows ten years down the road, that sounds like an easy one. Windows XP would be very familiar to Windows 95 users. In fact there were no significant steps in between the two; Windows 98 was Windows 95+ and Windows XP is Windows 2000+.
Re:Amazon knows that people hate sales tax
on
Book 'Em, Dano
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· Score: 1
It showed that a person would rather go with a more expensive online store in order to avoid paying sales tax. In fact, the data suggested that people would pay $5 more for the product to avoid $1 of sales tax.
I think it's because people hait bait-and-switch. Many online stores don't let you see the real price (including shipping and any taxes) until after you've taken the time to enter a lot of personal information. Only then, finally, do you know what the deal really is.
Personally I'd be much happier if they simply let you enter your zip code once to show accurate, complete prices throughout the site.
Maybe the slashdot crowd can propose some rules to make it interesting again?
I don't see how the designs could not converge. F1 racers all look the same. Tanks all look the same. Forklikfts all look the same. Given a fixed set of requirements, is that inevitable?
The notion of "usability" isn't too useful if it doesn't require meeting the requirements! You can't compare the iPod to e.g. a Rio Sport without lumping a separate stopwatch and FM radio in with the Shuffle, if you need those features (which I do).
As for lacking any screen, well to be fair I'll have to reserve judgement because I haven't tried it. But the fact is, any other company releasing the Shuffle would have been laughed off the stage without a fair trial.
What do you do? you watch the social pressure change their society. If the Chinese stopped thinking "you must marry because it's socially expected of you" they'd be better off.
Huh? I thought we were all good little scientists here. According to evolution, the correct answer is "hit all the other guys over the head with your club until you prove you're the alpha male and drag the women off by their hair"
Well, that's what we do with dogs, and look how they turned out. Most of the perverted creatures you see at a dog show wouldn't last a week in the wild. This will just lead to a bunch of muscle-bound boys with skeletal problems and tipsy women with DD boobs.
Look at how many projects in freshmeat are at at version 0.5 and haven't been touched in a year.
I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that; most of those little freshmeat projects are just personal projects that somebody graciously offered to the public.
Whether the code will be open is irrelevant; if the govt. lets out a contract, there should be deliverables and they should be delivered. Unfortunately that sometimes doesn't happen.
Government should not be funding OSS unless it is under contract to provide an immediate service that is needed.
That shouldn't be hard, government needs every kind of software.
If you want to get annoyed with govt. waste, think how much govt. (at all levels) has spent on MS Office over the years. How many billions does Microsoft have sitting in the back? And guess who is their biggest custmer: the govt. of course.
It's time to end the Microsoft handout. For a relatively paltry fee, the government could get competitive bids to fix up OpenOffice in whatever way necessary (if at all) to meet government needs. Over time it would save billions!
The only one that really doesn't fit in is a full-sized camera for artistic shots.
PDA/Cellphone cameras are useful for something else: they're high-bandwidth input devices. You don't carry a wad of business cards people have given you; you just push a button and capture the card into your PDA. You capture whiteboard contents. You grab the VIN of the cars you're interested in at a car lot so you can run Carfax on them later.
Pretty soon the megapixels will be high enough to capture an 8.5x11" page of text all at once, which will be great.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the "news" aspect of it isn't the technology per se, but the fact that it's actually catching on. Surprising.
If "Defense" is so important to the charter, they should make up their mind about keeping it in the name.
Plus the LCD image is sharp and has perfect geometry. I don't think anything beats a decent LCD hooked up with DVI for coding and most office work (and browsing slashdot). (I can't speak for other applications because those are my only applications).
An "iTunes for movies," is not the same as an "iPod replacement," since the iPod itself is obviously useless for movies.
I doubt movies formatted for the little PSP with it's 480x272 screen would be popular targets for piracy. Especially when the movies are already released as DVD's which are presumably much higher quality and easy to rip.
Does that matter? Well, it does to some.
A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)
However I think the single biggest boon to Gimp would be if Adobe found a way to stop PhotoShop piracy, and chose to do so.
The main point at issue here on Slashdot is not whether the ruling was correct according to the law, but whether the law is good.
From the article:
But on the other hand, this would amount to charging "long distance" on the Internet - one rate for local connections, and a higher rate for everywhere else. Is that a can of worms we want to open?
My own theory of scientific progress is that while facts and theories proliferate exponentially, they tend to diminish in significance at the same rate. When a field is new, it's easy to make breakthroughs. As it matures, most of the big ideas have been thought but there are armies of people churning out lots of paper.
Look at medical research; the most significant breakthoughs were the easiest to make - like penicillin. Now we're pouring billions into Cancer year after year and making a little progress. Longevity and quality of life are not increasing exponentially.
Look at transportation, rockets and jets were invented 60 years ago and since then nothing has supplanted them. Passenger jets don't look much different from 40 years ago. Cars haven't changed fundamentally in approximately one lifetime.
I'm not saying change has ceased, only that I'm not sure things are really changing any faster now than they were a couple hundred years ago. Some poeple think we're accelerating ever faster towards an incomprehensible future with no continuity, I don't think so.
As for Windows ten years down the road, that sounds like an easy one. Windows XP would be very familiar to Windows 95 users. In fact there were no significant steps in between the two; Windows 98 was Windows 95+ and Windows XP is Windows 2000+.
Personally I'd be much happier if they simply let you enter your zip code once to show accurate, complete prices throughout the site.
I don't see how the designs could not converge. F1 racers all look the same. Tanks all look the same. Forklikfts all look the same. Given a fixed set of requirements, is that inevitable?
As for lacking any screen, well to be fair I'll have to reserve judgement because I haven't tried it. But the fact is, any other company releasing the Shuffle would have been laughed off the stage without a fair trial.
Well, that's what we do with dogs, and look how they turned out. Most of the perverted creatures you see at a dog show wouldn't last a week in the wild. This will just lead to a bunch of muscle-bound boys with skeletal problems and tipsy women with DD boobs.
Whether the code will be open is irrelevant; if the govt. lets out a contract, there should be deliverables and they should be delivered. Unfortunately that sometimes doesn't happen.
If you want to get annoyed with govt. waste, think how much govt. (at all levels) has spent on MS Office over the years. How many billions does Microsoft have sitting in the back? And guess who is their biggest custmer: the govt. of course.
It's time to end the Microsoft handout. For a relatively paltry fee, the government could get competitive bids to fix up OpenOffice in whatever way necessary (if at all) to meet government needs. Over time it would save billions!
PDA/Cellphone cameras are useful for something else: they're high-bandwidth input devices. You don't carry a wad of business cards people have given you; you just push a button and capture the card into your PDA. You capture whiteboard contents. You grab the VIN of the cars you're interested in at a car lot so you can run Carfax on them later.
Pretty soon the megapixels will be high enough to capture an 8.5x11" page of text all at once, which will be great.
As for playing mp3's, almost anything with a headphone jack (including iPaqs) can do that.