Essentially Airport Express and a bunch of less usable products from Cisco et al do everything Sonos does except the analog loophole (which is a cool feature... but only useful in rather odd situations).
Consider possible users:
1. Hi Fi enthusiast.
This person is not going to pay $1200 to use a cheesy 50W amplifier.
2. Computer Nut.
Already has all his/her audio digitized and several spare computers lying around along with a wireless network and some decent stereos. Why pay $1200 for Sonos when $129 per Airport Express hub gets you even more?
3. Idiot with too much money.
Sonos only started providing speakers as an afterthought, and the speakers do not match the rest of the gear. The standalone server hasn't been released yet. So now you need to install software, show them how to rip media, etc. Hmm, iTunes sounds better every minute.
Re:Click here to download plugin
on
The Onion in 2056
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Flash is proprietary but the file format is open and well-documented and last time I checked there was an open source clone under development...
Given the truly staggering amount of Flash content out there, the idea that some kind of support for it won't exist in 2056 is daft. It may be running under 15 layers of emulation... but who cares?
Indeed, reporting the death of B&W processing because Kodak is out of it is like reporting the death of digital SLRs because Kodak stopped selling them.
It's hilarious the backwards hoops folks jump through trying to do nice footers (for dynamically generated content) using css.
It's all very well to create static pages that look like works of art (e.g. csszengarden) but you can put a footer across the bottom of a 3 column layout trivially using a table, and -- if you're very persistent -- using rocket science level css which depends on the order the content appears in in the page (which is surely one of the main things css was supposed to avoid).
After tooling up a dynamic site from scratch to use CSS to do simple stuff like boxes and then running it past folks for usability and layout -- I ended up re-implementing it as a bunch of nested tables.
Worked on more browsers. Was far simpler to work with. Looked better.
I predict that you'll be able to run Mac, Windows, and Linux apps in overlapping Windows on Macintel. This is great for Linux apps (for starters, they'll start getting real usability criticism). It will also allow developers to target Linux as a platform and be able to run on pretty much any computer out there.
Unlike Windows and MacOS you can cheerfully include an image of an OS you know your app runs on with your software (possibly on a separate CD if there are licensing issues).
I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture.
How was this painful? How was this nasty? The vast majority of programs just worked and had perfectly good performance and could not be told apart from native applications. I continued to use several such programs (e.g. WriteNow and Studio/32) until the OS X transition. (They still both work under Classic, but Classic isn't as seamlessly integrated into OS X as 68k was into PowerPC.)
But it was still hard.
No it wasn't! You just ran the programs. What was hard?
Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years, and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running
What slowdown? It didn't affect anything else. And the programs ran faster than they would on any actual 68k box. Slower than what?
the 68k binaries never quite went away
They still haven't gone away. If Classic is ported to x86 then they'll NEVER go away.
sometimes relatively essential apps had been made by developers who had disappeared off the face of the planet
Like T/Maker (WriteNow) and EA's non-games division (Studio/32) -- and guess what, their apps still run. In fact the transition from 24-bit to 32-bit was more painful.
In fact, I know of almost no programs that were 32-bit clean and color-safe that were broken by the PowerPC transition. Name one!
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X. (snipped a bunch of whining) It took five years or so, but the software library has now gotten to the point where if I suddenly find myself thinking "hmm, I need an app that does blah" I can look on versiontracker and more likely than not find it.
And just like the PowerPC transition didn't stop you using anything, this one won't wither.
Except now this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero.
No, it won't. See above.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer, maybe a few tens of percents faster.
You're assuming that IBM/PowerPC "continues" to keep apace with Intel. If you look at the G5, it more than kept up with Intel from 3.0 GHz to 3.6GHz (going from 2.0 GHz to 2.7 GHz). But it had lagged for 2y prior to that, and it looks like lagging for the next couple of years (look at the cheap dual core CPUs the Intel world is getting right now). More likely in 2y we'll have a 100% speed advantage.
Meanwhile most of us already using Macintoshes weren't doing so for the speed
So the slowdown of using a 68k app is unbearable except when speed isn't a factor?
And it won't be fun. Oh, but it's just a recompile to add x86 compatibility! Well, I've heard that line before. And that's fine for the handful of great OS X open source apps, but for the rest good luck finding someone to do that recompile. I know it wasn't easy last time.
Which last time? The last time Apple switched hardware (where you literally could just recompile) or the last time Apple switched operating systems and threw away 90% of the API calls your code relied on. Hmm?
They could have, if they wanted, made OS X a truly cross platform OS to begin with, meaning that a transition to x86 now would be painless.
They did. They just didn't give you the x86 compiler.
Which means-- just like last time this happened-- give it a year or so and developers will not want to bother to compile for us.
Yeah, and they won't backport Spotlight to 10.3 either.
My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes
I'm in favor of placing a disposal tax on anything which needs disposal. The tax collected could be paid to folks who cleanly dispose of things (including recycling them). This would improve the economics of recycling, help reduce landfill, and provide a financial disincentive against excessive packaging.
And while we're at it, gasoline tax should pay for, say, 75% of the Defense budget.
This is a terrible analogy since it likens increasing clock speed to reducing the length of lessons which essentially makes each clock cycle less useful.
While clock speed isn't directly proportional to performance, in general you expect *some* improvement in performance from an increase in clock speed, all things being equal. Given that class periods include wasted time at the start and end, you'd expect a *drop* in performance from the "analogous" reduced time per class period.
The "My" prefix was apparently an attempt to create a personal connection between people and their computers at a time when the idea of using a computer might have been forbidding.
Funny how people feel much stronger personal attachments to their Macs than to their PCs. Perhaps creating a user experience that doesn't suck might be a better way of creating a personal connection between people and their computers.
I figure that this is the same reason they don't teach the slide ruler in schools much anymore. It's not because the technology isn't valid and useful, it's because the pros in the field no longer use it. Why teach something that just isn't going to be used in real life?
After all, these days just coming up with ideas for what you're going to do with all the excessive horsepower that anyone will (a) care about and (b) believe takes real talent.
Of course, claiming that vN+1 will do what you promised vN would do also works pretty well.
Fair experiment, but I think you've reductio ad absurdum the wrong assumption (which is why RAA is considered inferior to constructive proofs by many). I'd suggest that the idea that a copy is the same as the original is the problem assumption.
I don't think we know enough about consciousness to make statements such as 'when you go to sleep you effectively "die"'. I find sleep very pleasant in a way that I didn't find "not having been born yet".
Life is change. Arguing that the fact that you aren't exactly the same today as you were yesterday means that a copy of yourself made two years ago who has since had completely different life experiences IS YOU is another thing entirely. This would argue that identical twins are the same person.
I think you'll find a lot of "dogmatic idiots" about.
Well if I download myself to Silicon and then have a conversation with the download version, I contend that I am me and the download version is a copy. It will be of no benefit to me should I be run over by a bus that the download version of me exists.
What's the difference between your calculator and my calculator? Well, they're different calculators. If my calculator gets stepped on, I no longer have my calculator. It is of no benefit to me that you have an identical calculator.
Making a copy of yourself doesn't avoid death for you, it just means ongoing life for a copy of you.
This is not a subtle point.
Anyone who cannot grasp this either hasn't thought deeply about a subject, or is an idiot. Anyone who uses the title "futurologist" is likely the latter.
At the moment MS has a virtuous circles going for them:
Bloatware with Features requires Faster Boxes Faster Boxes come with new OS New OS requires new Bloatware
Similarly:
You gotta use Office/VB because you're using Windows and Exchange.
You gotta use Exchange because you're using Windows and Office/VB.
You gotta use Windows because you're using Office/VB and Exchange.
Let's consider the following scenario.
1) Longhorn never ships or is massively underwhelming when it does. No-one particularly wants to upgrade.
2) WINE gets to the point where most Win32 stuff just works under Linux. OR
2a) Game developers start targeting Linux because including the OS on the distribution DVD is cheaper than supporting n flavors of Win32.
3) XBox 360 and PS3 do a fantastic job of destroying the home PC market. Suddenly, fast PCs are neither necessary nor sexy.
3a) Commodity pricing in PowerPC land makes high-performance Macs and PPC Linux boxes so far ahead of x86 boxes in price/performance that the high end server market disappears for MS/Intel/AMD.
4) Businesses actually start paying more than lip service to TCO and stop buying new Windows licenses so they can get off the upgrade treadmill.
5) Gmail expands to do everything anyone cares about in MS Exchange. Google buys skype and integrates telephony and conferencing.
6) Vertical markets embrace web deployment over VB etc. Meanwhile Mono allows legacy.NET apps to be ported to open platforms.
The virtuous circles turn vicious. Bye bye Ballmer.
From TFA it appears that you don't even get that much -- in many cases the 512MB card is slower than a considerably cheaper 256MB card.
It strike me that the 512MB card may be of use to someone (e.g. scientific visualization?) who can find a use for all the video RAM... but that would be it.
...you're one of the paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.
Actually if you really are, you're probably still running some flavor of AmigaDOS on bizarro hardware today and were more offended by "waning days" than "paranoid crackpot"...
It's not like Microsoft is a single vendor now, is it?
And it's not like most large corporations don't voluntarily lock themselves into a single hardware vendor to avoid numerous compatibility issues (e.g. being able to hot-swap notebook hard disks etc.) and otherwise reduce support costs.
Ah yes, heaven forbid we lock ourselves into a single vendor. Now, make sure all the new desktops are Compaq 1245c's running Windows XP SP1 and Office 2003 RevA.
Slashdot Mirror
Essentially Airport Express and a bunch of less usable products from Cisco et al do everything Sonos does except the analog loophole (which is a cool feature ... but only useful in rather odd situations).
Consider possible users:
1. Hi Fi enthusiast.
This person is not going to pay $1200 to use a cheesy 50W amplifier.
2. Computer Nut.
Already has all his/her audio digitized and several spare computers lying around along with a wireless network and some decent stereos. Why pay $1200 for Sonos when $129 per Airport Express hub gets you even more?
3. Idiot with too much money.
Sonos only started providing speakers as an afterthought, and the speakers do not match the rest of the gear. The standalone server hasn't been released yet. So now you need to install software, show them how to rip media, etc. Hmm, iTunes sounds better every minute.
So what's their target market?
...to convince people to stop using Hotmail. Yay.
Flash is proprietary but the file format is open and well-documented and last time I checked there was an open source clone under development...
... but who cares?
Given the truly staggering amount of Flash content out there, the idea that some kind of support for it won't exist in 2056 is daft. It may be running under 15 layers of emulation
Indeed, reporting the death of B&W processing because Kodak is out of it is like reporting the death of digital SLRs because Kodak stopped selling them.
Footers.
It's hilarious the backwards hoops folks jump through trying to do nice footers (for dynamically generated content) using css.
It's all very well to create static pages that look like works of art (e.g. csszengarden) but you can put a footer across the bottom of a 3 column layout trivially using a table, and -- if you're very persistent -- using rocket science level css which depends on the order the content appears in in the page (which is surely one of the main things css was supposed to avoid).
Wouldn't this be LINE? You're running Linux not Mac OS under emulation, right?
BTW: I think it's a good idea and it will happen.
After tooling up a dynamic site from scratch to use CSS to do simple stuff like boxes and then running it past folks for usability and layout -- I ended up re-implementing it as a bunch of nested tables.
Worked on more browsers.
Was far simpler to work with.
Looked better.
Sad.
I predict that you'll be able to run Mac, Windows, and Linux apps in overlapping Windows on Macintel. This is great for Linux apps (for starters, they'll start getting real usability criticism). It will also allow developers to target Linux as a platform and be able to run on pretty much any computer out there.
Unlike Windows and MacOS you can cheerfully include an image of an OS you know your app runs on with your software (possibly on a separate CD if there are licensing issues).
I had to deal with a painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched from the 680x0 to the PowerPC architecture.
How was this painful? How was this nasty? The vast majority of programs just worked and had perfectly good performance and could not be told apart from native applications. I continued to use several such programs (e.g. WriteNow and Studio/32) until the OS X transition. (They still both work under Classic, but Classic isn't as seamlessly integrated into OS X as 68k was into PowerPC.)
But it was still hard.
No it wasn't! You just ran the programs. What was hard?
Mac users had to deal with the obnoxiousness of fat binaries vs ppc vs 68k for years, and the slowdown when those 68k apps were running
What slowdown? It didn't affect anything else. And the programs ran faster than they would on any actual 68k box. Slower than what?
the 68k binaries never quite went away
They still haven't gone away. If Classic is ported to x86 then they'll NEVER go away.
sometimes relatively essential apps had been made by developers who had disappeared off the face of the planet
Like T/Maker (WriteNow) and EA's non-games division (Studio/32) -- and guess what, their apps still run. In fact the transition from 24-bit to 32-bit was more painful.
In fact, I know of almost no programs that were 32-bit clean and color-safe that were broken by the PowerPC transition. Name one!
Awhile after this, I had to deal with another painful and extremely nasty transition, when Apple switched to OS X. (snipped a bunch of whining) It took five years or so, but the software library has now gotten to the point where if I suddenly find myself thinking "hmm, I need an app that does blah" I can look on versiontracker and more likely than not find it.
And just like the PowerPC transition didn't stop you using anything, this one won't wither.
Except now this new transition is going to make that library restart once again at zero.
No, it won't. See above.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers. When the whole thing's done, in three years or whenever, we'll have a marginally faster computer, maybe a few tens of percents faster.
You're assuming that IBM/PowerPC "continues" to keep apace with Intel. If you look at the G5, it more than kept up with Intel from 3.0 GHz to 3.6GHz (going from 2.0 GHz to 2.7 GHz). But it had lagged for 2y prior to that, and it looks like lagging for the next couple of years (look at the cheap dual core CPUs the Intel world is getting right now). More likely in 2y we'll have a 100% speed advantage.
Meanwhile most of us already using Macintoshes weren't doing so for the speed
So the slowdown of using a 68k app is unbearable except when speed isn't a factor?
And it won't be fun. Oh, but it's just a recompile to add x86 compatibility! Well, I've heard that line before. And that's fine for the handful of great OS X open source apps, but for the rest good luck finding someone to do that recompile. I know it wasn't easy last time.
Which last time? The last time Apple switched hardware (where you literally could just recompile) or the last time Apple switched operating systems and threw away 90% of the API calls your code relied on. Hmm?
They could have, if they wanted, made OS X a truly cross platform OS to begin with, meaning that a transition to x86 now would be painless.
They did. They just didn't give you the x86 compiler.
Which means-- just like last time this happened-- give it a year or so and developers will not want to bother to compile for us.
Yeah, and they won't backport Spotlight to 10.3 either.
My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes
I'm in favor of placing a disposal tax on anything which needs disposal. The tax collected could be paid to folks who cleanly dispose of things (including recycling them). This would improve the economics of recycling, help reduce landfill, and provide a financial disincentive against excessive packaging.
And while we're at it, gasoline tax should pay for, say, 75% of the Defense budget.
This is a terrible analogy since it likens increasing clock speed to reducing the length of lessons which essentially makes each clock cycle less useful.
While clock speed isn't directly proportional to performance, in general you expect *some* improvement in performance from an increase in clock speed, all things being equal. Given that class periods include wasted time at the start and end, you'd expect a *drop* in performance from the "analogous" reduced time per class period.
From TFA:
The "My" prefix was apparently an attempt to create a personal connection between people and their computers at a time when the idea of using a computer might have been forbidding.
Funny how people feel much stronger personal attachments to their Macs than to their PCs. Perhaps creating a user experience that doesn't suck might be a better way of creating a personal connection between people and their computers.
I figure that this is the same reason they don't teach the slide ruler in schools much anymore. It's not because the technology isn't valid and useful, it's because the pros in the field no longer use it. Why teach something that just isn't going to be used in real life?
i.e. you are a troll.
After all, these days just coming up with ideas for what you're going to do with all the excessive horsepower that anyone will (a) care about and (b) believe takes real talent.
Of course, claiming that vN+1 will do what you promised vN would do also works pretty well.
He wants a computer that's (a) spyware free and (b) actually useful for doing stuff...
Let's wait and see.
Fair experiment, but I think you've reductio ad absurdum the wrong assumption (which is why RAA is considered inferior to constructive proofs by many). I'd suggest that the idea that a copy is the same as the original is the problem assumption.
I don't think we know enough about consciousness to make statements such as 'when you go to sleep you effectively "die"'. I find sleep very pleasant in a way that I didn't find "not having been born yet".
Life is change. Arguing that the fact that you aren't exactly the same today as you were yesterday means that a copy of yourself made two years ago who has since had completely different life experiences IS YOU is another thing entirely. This would argue that identical twins are the same person.
I think you'll find a lot of "dogmatic idiots" about.
Well if I download myself to Silicon and then have a conversation with the download version, I contend that I am me and the download version is a copy. It will be of no benefit to me should I be run over by a bus that the download version of me exists.
What's the difference between your calculator and my calculator? Well, they're different calculators. If my calculator gets stepped on, I no longer have my calculator. It is of no benefit to me that you have an identical calculator.
Making a copy of yourself doesn't avoid death for you, it just means ongoing life for a copy of you.
This is not a subtle point.
Anyone who cannot grasp this either hasn't thought deeply about a subject, or is an idiot. Anyone who uses the title "futurologist" is likely the latter.
At the moment MS has a virtuous circles going for them:
.NET apps to be ported to open platforms.
Bloatware with Features requires Faster Boxes
Faster Boxes come with new OS
New OS requires new Bloatware
Similarly:
You gotta use Office/VB because you're using Windows and Exchange.
You gotta use Exchange because you're using Windows and Office/VB.
You gotta use Windows because you're using Office/VB and Exchange.
Let's consider the following scenario.
1) Longhorn never ships or is massively underwhelming when it does. No-one particularly wants to upgrade.
2) WINE gets to the point where most Win32 stuff just works under Linux. OR
2a) Game developers start targeting Linux because including the OS on the distribution DVD is cheaper than supporting n flavors of Win32.
3) XBox 360 and PS3 do a fantastic job of destroying the home PC market. Suddenly, fast PCs are neither necessary nor sexy.
3a) Commodity pricing in PowerPC land makes high-performance Macs and PPC Linux boxes so far ahead of x86 boxes in price/performance that the high end server market disappears for MS/Intel/AMD.
4) Businesses actually start paying more than lip service to TCO and stop buying new Windows licenses so they can get off the upgrade treadmill.
5) Gmail expands to do everything anyone cares about in MS Exchange. Google buys skype and integrates telephony and conferencing.
6) Vertical markets embrace web deployment over VB etc. Meanwhile Mono allows legacy
The virtuous circles turn vicious. Bye bye Ballmer.
Depends if you are visualizing some kind of insane dataset which might work better on the graphics cards' memory.
E.g. 1GB aeromag data is exactly the kind of thing that might work real well if you stuck it right on the card.
From TFA it appears that you don't even get that much -- in many cases the 512MB card is slower than a considerably cheaper 256MB card.
... but that would be it.
It strike me that the 512MB card may be of use to someone (e.g. scientific visualization?) who can find a use for all the video RAM
...you're one of the paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.
Actually if you really are, you're probably still running some flavor of AmigaDOS on bizarro hardware today and were more offended by "waning days" than "paranoid crackpot"...
Oh just mod me offtopic and get over with it.
I love the "single vendor" argument.
It's not like Microsoft is a single vendor now, is it?
And it's not like most large corporations don't voluntarily lock themselves into a single hardware vendor to avoid numerous compatibility issues (e.g. being able to hot-swap notebook hard disks etc.) and otherwise reduce support costs.
Ah yes, heaven forbid we lock ourselves into a single vendor. Now, make sure all the new desktops are Compaq 1245c's running Windows XP SP1 and Office 2003 RevA.