As long as Linux is perceived for tech-geeks, it won't be successful. We need a company like IBM to present Linux as socially acceptable and 'cool'. Only then will it be accepted by the non-pimply faced long haired linux zealots that we all are percieved as.
Minesweeper works great on my Orchid Farenheit
on
Laptop Video Upgrade
·
· Score: 1
"OpenMG X consists of the following software modules: 1. An encoding module which adds digital rights management information, such as the number of times content was copied or played, to music/movie content and converts them into code at the distributors' end. 2. A server module which distributes digital rights management information on content to the users' end. 3. Client module for developing application software compatible with "OpenMG X" Sony has put the client module (#3) into practice and created "MAGIQLIP", the network music player for PC."
It sounds like that as long as you don't use the MAGIQLIP software, you're fine. Tell me if I'm missing something here, or they just thought up another half-assed copyright protection scheme.
biggest telecom companies will go bye-bye
on
WorldCom Fraud Doubles
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I heard on the radio just last week...that there was a guy who worked at a New York investment research firm (they emphasized that he was NOT a broker/analyst), who said in a newspaper column (I think in the NYTimes) that 25 of the 29 largest telecom/photonics companies in the US were at risk of going bankrupt in the next coming months. He compared it to the early 20th century when there were over 50 car manufacturers in the US, and then after a major car industry meltdown, there were 5 companies which emerged from the dust.
This guy predicted that 25 of the largest telco companies will go down (and this 25 included Nortel, but that's the only name I remember), and NO ONE will rescue them at all, because the only way the other 4-5 companies will have a chance of a healthy life afterwards is if they let the companies go bankrupt (R.I.P.) while the 4-5 remaining companies will buy them up in a fire-sale.
Just wondering if anyone else heard about this prediction...it was just last week I think. I'd also like to get my hands on the article. If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know. I did a bit of Google searching and checked the NYTimes, but didn't find anything. Bad keywords probably.
As long as the service of being cryogenically preserved is a commodity, unsubsidized by the government or most insurance, the rich, prominent, and powerful will be the people self selected to undergo the service.
These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees.
I can even imagine the trusteeships being battered back and forth in the marketplace, as the companies that control the wealth of the dead compete with each other.
All in all a fucked up scenario. What do people think about existing or prospective national and international law to deal with this problem? Mind you, I'm partial to the belief that either we have to live in a differnet economic system, or we must make cryogenics a state supported medical service available to all - decided by lot, democratic selection, condition of health or some other scientific standard.
"Thermosyphons funnel fluid from the outside condenser to the evaporator on top of the microprocessor. But HP discarded thermosyphons, and heat pipes, because of "pulse boiling", a rapid cycle of heating and cooling that can damage the microprocessor, according to an internal study conducted in May of 2000. HP developed its evaporative cooling to eliminate pulse boiling, Patel said."
Since when does ExtremeTech use a story generator?
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV" FCC says "What standards?" Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you. FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?" Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!" Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!" FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth." Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV?? Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!" Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it." Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built." FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it." Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?" Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!" FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that" Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!" Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
It's pathetic when the U.S. Government can take a hard line on terrorism in traditional forms, but is cowed by a multinational corporation that has been demonstrated to be involved in monopolistic forms of terrorism. The FTC is basically giving up because they're tired of trying to fight Microsoft. What sort of precedent does this set for the Standard Oils of the new millenium?
This government has bowed to corporate interests at every turn. I'd be happy to see a list of cases where individual freedom was held in higher esteem than corporate interests. This is yet another side effect of the US's desire to remain an economic superpower. It has changed from a Representative Democracy to a colossal beauracratic corporation. Perhaps we should call it The United States of America Inc.?
Remember folks, a government that tramples the rights of the citizen is a tyrannical government. There is no leeway for arguement in that.
It's that same group saying the same thing again. Although I haven't reviewed their latest paper, I remember that I wasn't impressed with the statistical analysis of their data, as of the previous paper.
Personally, I won't find the evidence convincing untill another group takes some their own data and gets similar results. Given that many astronomers have similar sentiments, it seems that giving VLT time to the same group seems not the best use of VLT time.
Of course, if no other astronomers find the likelyhood of the discovery worth the effort of making the observations, then it may be difficult to get independant confirmation. Given that it would be a really big deal if true, I think that says a lot about how seriously the astronomical community takes these claims.
My current place of employment still uses FORTRAN, and it's still a very integral part of the system.
The computer system is a real time host that processes up to 800 transactions per second. Each transaction consists of incoming data, validation, comparison to other data, writing of data to disk, formulation of reply, validation of reply and sending of reply. The central engines are written in FORTRAN.
We have a slightly nicer front end (pre-compiler) called RATFOR - it's much closer to C. The rest of the system is written in C, and there's some nice stuff done to interface between the FORTRAN and C code.
This system is supporting a very large business, and has to be stable. It also has to handle enormous amounts of transactions at peak periods. It has to do it reliably, and fast. FORTRAN is at the heart of this system, pumping away without problems. Don't think it's crap, just because it's old!
Things like this are exactly why I no longer use Verisign/NetSol as my registrar. However, unfortunately this not their only dirty trick.
Aside from this, which is very similar to long-distance carrier slamming, Verisign also has a nasty habit of holding onto domains/not allowing customers to transfer their own domains. I know several people who were forced to wait for MONTHS for Verisign to finally go ahead and transfer their domains to another registrar, and that was only after repeated calls to them. Verisign's own transfer process was completely ignored, in the hopes of squeezing another $35 out of the billing contact.
Verisign also uses deceptive overbilling; if you register a domain with them for a year, come renewal time, they will send you a renewal bill for $70 or more! Of course, only in the very fine print do they tell you that it's $35 a year, so they are trying to make you renew for 2+ years. Yes, you can select 1 year, but they should not default to 2 years unless you previously paid for 2 years. It is very carefully worded to make it look like you actually owe them $70+.
Lastly, they make it ridiculously tough to modify your own contact information for a domain. I had a domain which was registered in my name, and with an email address that was now expired. So, you have to fax them a paper requesting a change of email address. Fine, no problem there. However, I had to send them nine faxes before it got changed. I would call to followup the fax, and they would repeatedly claim that it was never received. It took over 3 1/2 months for me to get an email address changed on a domain contact!! Of course, if you sign up for their expensive premium services, it only takes a day; glad to know where regular customers stand with Verisign.
I recommend that anyone who does use them to switch elsewhere. A company like Verisign/NetSol does not deserve our business.
Most people who would be interested in using Linux are tech-savvy enough to realize that it can be downloaded for free. Even those who are not very tech-savvy are aware of that because the mainstream press trumpets the fact that Linux is free as it's best feature.
"because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux"
I just want to make it clear that I will not attend UNC due to the fact that this bastard helped all you long-haired Linux zealots get your precious toy. I hope you all burn in hell.
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
On some DVD players, you can disable Macrovision by means of uploading a new ROM into the player by burning it onto an ISO 9660 CD-R, or by hitting a secret key combination on the remote. It's mostly APEXes and Daewoos that let you do this; ironic that they are the cheapest yet most hackable DVD players. I have a cute little APEX I scored for $70 at Circuit City... that sucker plays DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs, CD-Rs, MP3s (!), and they kitchen sink. Most DVD players have a "Factory setting" menu that you can get to, but you need to know the secret code.
Of course you'd never get goodies like this from the big boys (aka Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic).
What needs to be understood is that they've managed to use a fusion generator to generate electricity. However, they've never managed to create electricity in a useful fashion.
As it stands, they can create an efficient reactor that is not self-sustaining or a self-sustaining reactor that is not efficient. In other words, the former uses very little outside power, but isn't stable and ceases to function. The latter is more stable, but uses more fuel than conventional means.
Fusion power is not a pipe dream. Just as conventional power reactors have been improved over time to produce electricity more efficiently, so will fusion reactors eventually be improved to the point where they're useful. Will it be in the next decade? It may well be, but regardless of when it will happen, it will happen.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
Its an interesting paradox that the nerdiest of computer geeks are programming robots to interact socially...
These people are the most qualified and least qualified at the same time!
Slashdot Mirror
"this is just a stupid submission slashdot put up because they needed an article"
Actually, no. It was michael's turn to post a story, and he is gay.
As long as Linux is perceived for tech-geeks, it won't be successful. We need a company like IBM to present Linux as socially acceptable and 'cool'. Only then will it be accepted by the non-pimply faced long haired linux zealots that we all are percieved as.
And it can be closed quickly if someone walks by.
dedicated to all the gay linux lovers.
"OpenMG X consists of the following software modules:
1. An encoding module which adds digital rights management information, such as the number of times content was copied or played, to music/movie content and converts them into code at the distributors' end.
2. A server module which distributes digital rights management information on content to the users' end.
3. Client module for developing application software compatible with "OpenMG X" Sony has put the client module (#3) into practice and created "MAGIQLIP", the network music player for PC."
It sounds like that as long as you don't use the MAGIQLIP software, you're fine. Tell me if I'm missing something here, or they just thought up another half-assed copyright protection scheme.
I heard on the radio just last week...that there was a guy who worked at a New York investment research firm (they emphasized that he was NOT a broker/analyst), who said in a newspaper column (I think in the NYTimes) that 25 of the 29 largest telecom/photonics companies in the US were at risk of going bankrupt in the next coming months. He compared it to the early 20th century when there were over 50 car manufacturers in the US, and then after a major car industry meltdown, there were 5 companies which emerged from the dust.
This guy predicted that 25 of the largest telco companies will go down (and this 25 included Nortel, but that's the only name I remember), and NO ONE will rescue them at all, because the only way the other 4-5 companies will have a chance of a healthy life afterwards is if they let the companies go bankrupt (R.I.P.) while the 4-5 remaining companies will buy them up in a fire-sale.
Just wondering if anyone else heard about this prediction...it was just last week I think. I'd also like to get my hands on the article. If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know. I did a bit of Google searching and checked the NYTimes, but didn't find anything. Bad keywords probably.
in a capitalist society.
Let's assume the technical problems are solved..
As long as the service of being cryogenically preserved is a commodity, unsubsidized by the government or most insurance, the rich, prominent, and powerful will be the people self selected to undergo the service.
These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees.
I can even imagine the trusteeships being battered back and forth in the marketplace, as the companies that control the wealth of the dead compete with each other.
All in all a fucked up scenario. What do people think about existing or prospective national and international law to deal with this problem? Mind you, I'm partial to the belief that either we have to live in a differnet economic system, or we must make cryogenics a state supported medical service available to all - decided by lot, democratic selection, condition of health or some other scientific standard.
"Thermosyphons funnel fluid from the outside condenser to the evaporator on top of the microprocessor. But HP discarded thermosyphons, and heat pipes, because of "pulse boiling", a rapid cycle of heating and cooling that can damage the microprocessor, according to an internal study conducted in May of 2000. HP developed its evaporative cooling to eliminate pulse boiling, Patel said."
Since when does ExtremeTech use a story generator?
The lazy man's guide to building a computerized android hand:
Step one - Find an android.
Step two - Decapitate said android.
Yep. Look it up under "older stuff". It was kind of vile, but it's easier to copy and paste then to retype. :-)
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer ;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV
FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV"
FCC says "What standards?"
Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you.
FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?"
Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!"
Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!"
FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth."
Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV??
Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!"
Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it."
Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built."
FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it."
Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?"
Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"
FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that"
Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!"
Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
It's pathetic when the U.S. Government can take a hard line on terrorism in traditional forms, but is cowed by a multinational corporation that has been demonstrated to be involved in monopolistic forms of terrorism. The FTC is basically giving up because they're tired of trying to fight Microsoft. What sort of precedent does this set for the Standard Oils of the new millenium?
This government has bowed to corporate interests at every turn. I'd be happy to see a list of cases where individual freedom was held in higher esteem than corporate interests. This is yet another side effect of the US's desire to remain an economic superpower. It has changed from a Representative Democracy to a colossal beauracratic corporation. Perhaps we should call it The United States of America Inc.?
Remember folks, a government that tramples the rights of the citizen is a tyrannical government. There is no leeway for arguement in that.
See Junkfax.org if you want in-depth info on how to get junk faxers to pay you as well. :)
It's that same group saying the same thing again. Although I haven't reviewed their latest paper, I remember that I wasn't impressed with the statistical analysis of their data, as of the previous paper.
Personally, I won't find the evidence convincing untill another group takes some their own data and gets similar results. Given that many astronomers have similar sentiments, it seems that giving VLT time to the same group seems not the best use of VLT time.
Of course, if no other astronomers find the likelyhood of the discovery worth the effort of making the observations, then it may be difficult to get independant confirmation. Given that it would be a really big deal if true, I think that says a lot about how seriously the astronomical community takes these claims.
My current place of employment still uses FORTRAN, and it's still a very integral part of the system.
The computer system is a real time host that processes up to 800 transactions per second. Each transaction consists of incoming data, validation, comparison to other data, writing of data to disk, formulation of reply, validation of reply and sending of reply. The central engines are written in FORTRAN.
We have a slightly nicer front end (pre-compiler) called RATFOR - it's much closer to C. The rest of the system is written in C, and there's some nice stuff done to interface between the FORTRAN and C code.
This system is supporting a very large business, and has to be stable. It also has to handle enormous amounts of transactions at peak periods. It has to do it reliably, and fast. FORTRAN is at the heart of this system, pumping away without problems. Don't think it's crap, just because it's old!
Things like this are exactly why I no longer use Verisign/NetSol as my registrar. However, unfortunately this not their only dirty trick.
Aside from this, which is very similar to long-distance carrier slamming, Verisign also has a nasty habit of holding onto domains/not allowing customers to transfer their own domains. I know several people who were forced to wait for MONTHS for Verisign to finally go ahead and transfer their domains to another registrar, and that was only after repeated calls to them. Verisign's own transfer process was completely ignored, in the hopes of squeezing another $35 out of the billing contact.
Verisign also uses deceptive overbilling; if you register a domain with them for a year, come renewal time, they will send you a renewal bill for $70 or more! Of course, only in the very fine print do they tell you that it's $35 a year, so they are trying to make you renew for 2+ years. Yes, you can select 1 year, but they should not default to 2 years unless you previously paid for 2 years. It is very carefully worded to make it look like you actually owe them $70+.
Lastly, they make it ridiculously tough to modify your own contact information for a domain. I had a domain which was registered in my name, and with an email address that was now expired. So, you have to fax them a paper requesting a change of email address. Fine, no problem there. However, I had to send them nine faxes before it got changed. I would call to followup the fax, and they would repeatedly claim that it was never received. It took over 3 1/2 months for me to get an email address changed on a domain contact!! Of course, if you sign up for their expensive premium services, it only takes a day; glad to know where regular customers stand with Verisign.
I recommend that anyone who does use them to switch elsewhere. A company like Verisign/NetSol does not deserve our business.
Most people who would be interested in using Linux are tech-savvy enough to realize that it can be downloaded for free.
Even those who are not very tech-savvy are aware of that because the mainstream press trumpets the fact that Linux is free as it's best feature.
"because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux" I just want to make it clear that I will not attend UNC due to the fact that this bastard helped all you long-haired Linux zealots get your precious toy. I hope you all burn in hell.
EEF information on the Jon Johansen case.
Read the indictment. in Norwegian.
Linux World interview with Johansen.
Swedish coverage of the case.
EEF campaign to free Johansen.
Old slashdot article about original indictment.
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
Abacus
On some DVD players, you can disable Macrovision by means of uploading a new ROM into the player by burning it onto an ISO 9660 CD-R, or by hitting a secret key combination on the remote. It's mostly APEXes and Daewoos that let you do this; ironic that they are the cheapest yet most hackable DVD players. I have a cute little APEX I scored for $70 at Circuit City... that sucker plays DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs, CD-Rs, MP3s (!), and they kitchen sink. Most DVD players have a "Factory setting" menu that you can get to, but you need to know the secret code. Of course you'd never get goodies like this from the big boys (aka Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic).
What needs to be understood is that they've managed to use a fusion generator to generate electricity. However, they've never managed to create electricity in a useful fashion.
As it stands, they can create an efficient reactor that is not self-sustaining or a self-sustaining reactor that is not efficient. In other words, the former uses very little outside power, but isn't stable and ceases to function. The latter is more stable, but uses more fuel than conventional means.
Fusion power is not a pipe dream. Just as conventional power reactors have been improved over time to produce electricity more efficiently, so will fusion reactors eventually be improved to the point where they're useful. Will it be in the next decade? It may well be, but regardless of when it will happen, it will happen.
you haven't seen anything yet.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
Its an interesting paradox that the nerdiest of computer geeks are programming robots to interact socially... These people are the most qualified and least qualified at the same time!