Yes, but that would require that people actually be able to change permissions on what individual programs can access. I recently got an Android phone and find it quite laughable what kind of permissions some apps are asking for. Why does a tic-tac-toe game need access to my contact list, the internet (ok ads are one explanation), and my phone information (call information, when I make a call, who the call is to, my phone number etc)? I should be able to lock down my phone by default. There should be no reason I shouldn't explicitly be able to deny programs information to sensors and internal phone data and just send them empty data if they ask for it, so they don't crash. I liked this about my old Nokia phone a lot . It would frequently ask and reask when programs could access the network. It was a little bit of an annoyance, but at least I know I had control over what apps were doing. There's firewalls for the network that can be applied at the application level, but for me that isn't good enough. I immediately thought of a way around it in which one has access to your contact and phone history, and wrote the information out to the SD card, while another app which actually needed access to the network but didn't have access to the contact info (and therefore you were more likely to grant it net access) would read the same data off the SD card and send it over the internet. I can only think of a very limited set of applications that have access to contact lists and phone history. And really I would expect those apps to be built into the phone, not something you download from some random software maker.
My thoughts exactly. Most schools I've been to don't have a computer science department, but rather lump it in with the math or engineering department. Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Hydro can be turned off and on by simply closing the valve. The problem is that when you turn off the valve, the water starts to collect behind the dam, and if you leave it off for too long, it could overflow. However, it would be simple to create an overflow system in a hydro dam. Depending on how much power is needed at any one point, divert the water to the overflow system and just have it drain down the river instead of going through the turbines. You can also turn down nuclear by inserting those rods that slow down the nuclear reaction. There's also plenty of ways to use the excess power to our advantage. Have a smart grid that let people with battery units charge their batteries for super cheap when there is no demand for the excess power. Data centers, electric cars, even laptops could be programmed to draw and store more power when there is excess power on the grid. Maybe even fridges, freezers, and air conditioners could make more intelligent decisions about when to turn the compressor when it is more favorable for it to do so. Most air conditioners only run for part of the day anyways. If you synced up all the air conditioners in the neighbourhood so that they generated a smaller load instead of just when the temperature rose above a certain point (likely the same time for all houses in the same neighbourhood), you could releive quite a bit of stress on the grid.
This is kind of my view of the future. Have very small nuclear reactors, the kind you find on Navy Submarines that can be used to power a very small area, maybe just a single subdivision. Mass producing small, self contained reactors would probably bring the costs and complexity down quite a bit. Plus distribution would be much cheaper, because you wouldn't have to have super high capacity lines going all over the place. Nuclear power isn't that scary. I see no reason that we allow people to have gas furnaces and water heaters in their houses, but do not allow them to have a small scale nuclear reactor.
Actually, the hard drive is most frequently referred to as "storage" so that it isn't confused with "memory". When talking about computers, memory always means RAM. I've never heard a competent person in the IT field refer to a hard drive as memory.
Yeah, I like sports, don't mind watching them sometimes, but I'd much rather be participating than doing. If people (adult males anyway) traded their sports watching time for sports doing time, we would have a much smaller problem with obesity, and all the problems that go with it. I find the only sport I enjoy watching now is soccer. Primarily because they don't stop for commercials. All the other sports spend way too much time showing advertisements, and not enough time showing the actual sport. It's more exciting to go watch Junior A or university hockey than it is to watch the pros simply because the pros take too much time off for commercials. Really cuts the excitement out of the game.
Except that Akamai mostly deals with static content. Distribution of images, video and static pages. While Amazon allows you to host web applications on their platform. Plus you can rent out computing time for non-internet related purposes. Quite different services as far as I'm concerned.
With Windows 8 coming out, and running on ARM, plus the already existence of Windows Phone that runs on phones/ARM, I don't think it will take long before we see a TV running windows, or possibly a set top box running windows, kind of like the AppleTV.
So many things you can just plug into the TV now. Plug in your Wii/XBox360/PS3 and you can watch movies play games, browse the internet (Wii is pretty weak on this, not sure about the other two). There's also a plethora of boxes like Roku, AppleTV, LG, and others that a dumb simple to just plug in and use, so that you can watch all your shows streaming over the Net. My new (although old model) Android phone can plug into HDMI. Back in the old days, it was quite hard to get a computer to plug into a TV and not look like garbage. Now with digital inputs like HDMI, DVI, and even VGA (which is analog), it's quite easy to get a good picture on your screen from a computer. Spend $400 (or less) on a computer, plug it into your TV, and there you go. Although some of the viewing audience may not have an "elsewhere", that number is ever shrinking, and the only reason why anybody remains in that group is because their lack of willingness to learn, even just a little bit.
Also, you can rent big vans from Home Depot for about $25 for an hour or 2. Lots of space in there. They generally like if you buy something from them first, but I've known people who bought something big just to rent the van, go pick up what they actually needed, and then return the van and the large item at the same time. Also, truck rental places will give you a deal in the middle of the month when they aren't renting out many trucks. Just tell them you only need it for a couple hours. The trucks just sit there most of the time anyway, they only are really fully booked at the end/beginning of the month when most people move.
It really depends on exactly what you buy. I've seen things from IKEA that last 10 years, and I've seen things that fall apart in 2. Part of the problem is self-assembly. Something that isn't put together properly or with the screws a little too loose or too tight is going to have problems in the long term. Also, since when is 6 years a long time for something to last? People used to buy real wood furniture and pass it down through the generations. We currently have a table in our kitchen that my wife had in her house when she was a kid. Over 25 years old, easiliy. It wasn't even an expensive table. But it was built out of real wood, with sound construction techniques.
I would have to disagree on that. While Windows is a consumer operating system, and there is no programming required, Microsoft does quite a bit to get people programming on their OS. They give away great developer tools like VS Express Edition. If you don't want to install anything, you can program by creating a.vbs file and running that directly. It's not the most modern programming language, but you can do quite a few things with it. You can access quite a few things from it if you do a lot of digging and is quite good for system automation. People who complain that Windows doesn't have a good shell, try too much to do things in the command prompt and don't realize how powerful vbs is.
Very much so. The only problem with PCMCIA is that People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. Also Thunderbolt is an equally stupid name. There is no such thing as a thunderbolt, as thunder is the sound. I think what they were looking for was Lightning Bolt. Also I don't want lightning or thunder anywhere near my electronics. Tends to cause problems.
Depends what web browser you are running. In 2000, we didn't have firefox in it's current version, which seems to like to use 100 MB of RAM just to start up. You could definitely run the stock IE version that came with it, probably all the way up to IE6. Also web pages themselves tended to be a lot smaller, because many people were on Dial-up in those days. Same logic goes for just about all the applications that you would want to use. If you used windows XP with year 2001-2004 software, doing 2001-2004 tasks, you wouldn't have much of a problem. Just don't try running iTunes, Firefox, or any of the other memory intensive programs we all take for granted these days.
What I want to know is, why did they choose a data center in the middle of the city? Why is any data center in the middle of the city? The beautiful thing about the internet is that the datacenter can be located where ever you want. Also, very few people are actually needed on-site to keep a data center operational. Most of the people who actually administer the systems could easily work offsite, possibly from home.
Depends what you qualify as older. Windows XP System Requirements say it will run on 64 MB of RAM with 233 MHz Processor. The recommended is only 300 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. Have fun getting Windows 7 to run under those conditions. The minimum amount of memory for Windows 7 is 1 GB, and it requires 16 GB of hard drive space. When windows XP was released, many computers didn't even have 16 GB of space.
I'm not so sure about that. An Android phone isn't any cheaper than a comparable Windows Phone or IOS phone simply because the operating system is free. There are some cheaper Android handsets from China, but they tend to be lower hardware quality as well. The first problem is that Windows XP would have to be ported to ARM. Because nobody wants to have a phone that runs an X86 processor. This would be a monumental task. Not to mention, it wasn't even designed for mobile hardware, so even after you got it to compile, there'd still be a whole lot of work to do to make it a viable platform for mobile computing. And then you have to port all the existing apps to run on ARM. What you are saying basically makes no sense at all. I could see it staying strong in the desktop market. Even if you don't patch it. Put it behind a good firewall, add a modern browser and you are pretty much set. Windows XP can run on some pretty old hardware.
Also, they sell hardwood flooring material for under $5.00 a square foot, with a table that's 3 feet x 6 feet, that's 18 sq feet. For $90 you could do the table top itself in real hardwood. Wood isn't that expensive.
That's what I was thinking. How do you have digital currency that is anonymous? Makes no sense to me. Either there is a verifiable record of the transaction on some 3rd party machine to ensure that money was actually transferred from one account to another, which means it's not anonymous, or it is anonymous, but depends on some hard-to-break DRM going on inside the card. The problem is that there's just too much to be gained from breaking the DRM. If you break the DRM you can basically print money. This is the same problem that's existed on all non-centrally managed payment cards. From photocopier cards to transit systems. People figure out how to break the DRM and charge up their card as much as they want. When it's photocopies and transit, there's isn't much lost or gained in breaking the system. But with something that's actually equivalent with cash, there's room for a lot of fraud.
Yeah, for $3500. For that price, the are definitely build to order. They are probably making quite a bit off each sale, but there's probably a lot of time spent making even a single table. For $500 and a lot of hard work you could easily build this thing yourself.
I think kickstarter is a great idea for some projects. Projects where you get physical goods in hand. Because with most physical goods, the cost is reduced greatly if you can get 5000 people pledging to buy your product. However I'm seeing a lot of kickstarter projects for intangible items (Just the first example I thought of). This seems odd to me. If there are no physical goods, then what start-up costs do they have, other than the time spent on the creative part. Which personally, I think the old model works just fine. Produce something, and then if it's good, I'll buy it. Most of the good kickstarter projects I've seen have a working model, they just need a bunch of money so they can buy materials in bulk and ship them out. Asking for a bunch of money to write a book, up front, is not the kind of thing I picture as something that needs to be funded on places like kickstarter.
This is the reason that CSS 2.1 isn't bug free yet in any browser. CSS 2 change list. It's a moving target. Granted there are some browsers with very terrible CSS support, but the CSS Spec is very complicated. Add that to the fact that most pages don't even start out with standards compliant HTML, so the browser has to guess what to do because you didn't close your tags properly, or you put a div inside a span.
I'd much rather just use my choice of shared hosting providers. That's decentralized enough for me. I don't want to have to leave a computer connected to the internet 24/7, nor do I want to have to worry about ensuring it doesn't have security problems. Let the pros deal with that. Granted there are some pretty shady hosting services in the race-to-the-bottom world we live in, but there are some reputable hosting companies out there. I'm all for cheap, free, ubiquitous internet, but hosting your own web presence is probably something you shouldn't bother with out of your house.
Not only that, but they can't start sending at 1 Gbps because most likely the other end couldn't handle it, and start dropping packets anyway. So they start sending slow, and have to figure out when packets are dropped to figure out which speed is the appropriate to send at, so that the file goes as fast as possible without going too fast, and having packets dropped. Most likely by the time most web files are done, they won't have even gotten up to full speed on a 1 Gbps line. Also, what is the point of 1 Gbps? In terms of networks, it's not really that fast, I mean, we've had gigabit network cards for decades. On the other end of the spectrum, most people don't even need 1 Gbps. You could easily stream HD video over 10 Mbps line. My cable company offers 75 Mbps. That's more than enough to watch 3 or 4 HD streams at once. Unless you are running a business or doing research out of your home, the current methods of delivering data to you home are already more than fast enough. Most home users are perfectly happy with something around 10 Mbps. I wouldn't mind a gigabit connection, but can't think of what use it would be to me over a 10 mbit connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that would require that people actually be able to change permissions on what individual programs can access. I recently got an Android phone and find it quite laughable what kind of permissions some apps are asking for. Why does a tic-tac-toe game need access to my contact list, the internet (ok ads are one explanation), and my phone information (call information, when I make a call, who the call is to, my phone number etc)? I should be able to lock down my phone by default. There should be no reason I shouldn't explicitly be able to deny programs information to sensors and internal phone data and just send them empty data if they ask for it, so they don't crash. I liked this about my old Nokia phone a lot . It would frequently ask and reask when programs could access the network. It was a little bit of an annoyance, but at least I know I had control over what apps were doing. There's firewalls for the network that can be applied at the application level, but for me that isn't good enough. I immediately thought of a way around it in which one has access to your contact and phone history, and wrote the information out to the SD card, while another app which actually needed access to the network but didn't have access to the contact info (and therefore you were more likely to grant it net access) would read the same data off the SD card and send it over the internet. I can only think of a very limited set of applications that have access to contact lists and phone history. And really I would expect those apps to be built into the phone, not something you download from some random software maker.
My thoughts exactly. Most schools I've been to don't have a computer science department, but rather lump it in with the math or engineering department. Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Hydro can be turned off and on by simply closing the valve. The problem is that when you turn off the valve, the water starts to collect behind the dam, and if you leave it off for too long, it could overflow. However, it would be simple to create an overflow system in a hydro dam. Depending on how much power is needed at any one point, divert the water to the overflow system and just have it drain down the river instead of going through the turbines. You can also turn down nuclear by inserting those rods that slow down the nuclear reaction. There's also plenty of ways to use the excess power to our advantage. Have a smart grid that let people with battery units charge their batteries for super cheap when there is no demand for the excess power. Data centers, electric cars, even laptops could be programmed to draw and store more power when there is excess power on the grid. Maybe even fridges, freezers, and air conditioners could make more intelligent decisions about when to turn the compressor when it is more favorable for it to do so. Most air conditioners only run for part of the day anyways. If you synced up all the air conditioners in the neighbourhood so that they generated a smaller load instead of just when the temperature rose above a certain point (likely the same time for all houses in the same neighbourhood), you could releive quite a bit of stress on the grid.
This is kind of my view of the future. Have very small nuclear reactors, the kind you find on Navy Submarines that can be used to power a very small area, maybe just a single subdivision. Mass producing small, self contained reactors would probably bring the costs and complexity down quite a bit. Plus distribution would be much cheaper, because you wouldn't have to have super high capacity lines going all over the place. Nuclear power isn't that scary. I see no reason that we allow people to have gas furnaces and water heaters in their houses, but do not allow them to have a small scale nuclear reactor.
Actually, the hard drive is most frequently referred to as "storage" so that it isn't confused with "memory". When talking about computers, memory always means RAM. I've never heard a competent person in the IT field refer to a hard drive as memory.
Yeah, I like sports, don't mind watching them sometimes, but I'd much rather be participating than doing. If people (adult males anyway) traded their sports watching time for sports doing time, we would have a much smaller problem with obesity, and all the problems that go with it. I find the only sport I enjoy watching now is soccer. Primarily because they don't stop for commercials. All the other sports spend way too much time showing advertisements, and not enough time showing the actual sport. It's more exciting to go watch Junior A or university hockey than it is to watch the pros simply because the pros take too much time off for commercials. Really cuts the excitement out of the game.
Except that Akamai mostly deals with static content. Distribution of images, video and static pages. While Amazon allows you to host web applications on their platform. Plus you can rent out computing time for non-internet related purposes. Quite different services as far as I'm concerned.
With Windows 8 coming out, and running on ARM, plus the already existence of Windows Phone that runs on phones/ARM, I don't think it will take long before we see a TV running windows, or possibly a set top box running windows, kind of like the AppleTV.
So many things you can just plug into the TV now. Plug in your Wii/XBox360/PS3 and you can watch movies play games, browse the internet (Wii is pretty weak on this, not sure about the other two). There's also a plethora of boxes like Roku, AppleTV, LG, and others that a dumb simple to just plug in and use, so that you can watch all your shows streaming over the Net. My new (although old model) Android phone can plug into HDMI. Back in the old days, it was quite hard to get a computer to plug into a TV and not look like garbage. Now with digital inputs like HDMI, DVI, and even VGA (which is analog), it's quite easy to get a good picture on your screen from a computer. Spend $400 (or less) on a computer, plug it into your TV, and there you go. Although some of the viewing audience may not have an "elsewhere", that number is ever shrinking, and the only reason why anybody remains in that group is because their lack of willingness to learn, even just a little bit.
Also, you can rent big vans from Home Depot for about $25 for an hour or 2. Lots of space in there. They generally like if you buy something from them first, but I've known people who bought something big just to rent the van, go pick up what they actually needed, and then return the van and the large item at the same time. Also, truck rental places will give you a deal in the middle of the month when they aren't renting out many trucks. Just tell them you only need it for a couple hours. The trucks just sit there most of the time anyway, they only are really fully booked at the end/beginning of the month when most people move.
It really depends on exactly what you buy. I've seen things from IKEA that last 10 years, and I've seen things that fall apart in 2. Part of the problem is self-assembly. Something that isn't put together properly or with the screws a little too loose or too tight is going to have problems in the long term. Also, since when is 6 years a long time for something to last? People used to buy real wood furniture and pass it down through the generations. We currently have a table in our kitchen that my wife had in her house when she was a kid. Over 25 years old, easiliy. It wasn't even an expensive table. But it was built out of real wood, with sound construction techniques.
I would have to disagree on that. While Windows is a consumer operating system, and there is no programming required, Microsoft does quite a bit to get people programming on their OS. They give away great developer tools like VS Express Edition. If you don't want to install anything, you can program by creating a .vbs file and running that directly. It's not the most modern programming language, but you can do quite a few things with it. You can access quite a few things from it if you do a lot of digging and is quite good for system automation. People who complain that Windows doesn't have a good shell, try too much to do things in the command prompt and don't realize how powerful vbs is.
Very much so. The only problem with PCMCIA is that People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. Also Thunderbolt is an equally stupid name. There is no such thing as a thunderbolt, as thunder is the sound. I think what they were looking for was Lightning Bolt. Also I don't want lightning or thunder anywhere near my electronics. Tends to cause problems.
Depends what web browser you are running. In 2000, we didn't have firefox in it's current version, which seems to like to use 100 MB of RAM just to start up. You could definitely run the stock IE version that came with it, probably all the way up to IE6. Also web pages themselves tended to be a lot smaller, because many people were on Dial-up in those days. Same logic goes for just about all the applications that you would want to use. If you used windows XP with year 2001-2004 software, doing 2001-2004 tasks, you wouldn't have much of a problem. Just don't try running iTunes, Firefox, or any of the other memory intensive programs we all take for granted these days.
What I want to know is, why did they choose a data center in the middle of the city? Why is any data center in the middle of the city? The beautiful thing about the internet is that the datacenter can be located where ever you want. Also, very few people are actually needed on-site to keep a data center operational. Most of the people who actually administer the systems could easily work offsite, possibly from home.
Depends what you qualify as older. Windows XP System Requirements say it will run on 64 MB of RAM with 233 MHz Processor. The recommended is only 300 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. Have fun getting Windows 7 to run under those conditions. The minimum amount of memory for Windows 7 is 1 GB, and it requires 16 GB of hard drive space. When windows XP was released, many computers didn't even have 16 GB of space.
I'm not so sure about that. An Android phone isn't any cheaper than a comparable Windows Phone or IOS phone simply because the operating system is free. There are some cheaper Android handsets from China, but they tend to be lower hardware quality as well. The first problem is that Windows XP would have to be ported to ARM. Because nobody wants to have a phone that runs an X86 processor. This would be a monumental task. Not to mention, it wasn't even designed for mobile hardware, so even after you got it to compile, there'd still be a whole lot of work to do to make it a viable platform for mobile computing. And then you have to port all the existing apps to run on ARM. What you are saying basically makes no sense at all. I could see it staying strong in the desktop market. Even if you don't patch it. Put it behind a good firewall, add a modern browser and you are pretty much set. Windows XP can run on some pretty old hardware.
Also, they sell hardwood flooring material for under $5.00 a square foot, with a table that's 3 feet x 6 feet, that's 18 sq feet. For $90 you could do the table top itself in real hardwood. Wood isn't that expensive.
That's what I was thinking. How do you have digital currency that is anonymous? Makes no sense to me. Either there is a verifiable record of the transaction on some 3rd party machine to ensure that money was actually transferred from one account to another, which means it's not anonymous, or it is anonymous, but depends on some hard-to-break DRM going on inside the card. The problem is that there's just too much to be gained from breaking the DRM. If you break the DRM you can basically print money. This is the same problem that's existed on all non-centrally managed payment cards. From photocopier cards to transit systems. People figure out how to break the DRM and charge up their card as much as they want. When it's photocopies and transit, there's isn't much lost or gained in breaking the system. But with something that's actually equivalent with cash, there's room for a lot of fraud.
Yeah, for $3500. For that price, the are definitely build to order. They are probably making quite a bit off each sale, but there's probably a lot of time spent making even a single table. For $500 and a lot of hard work you could easily build this thing yourself.
I think kickstarter is a great idea for some projects. Projects where you get physical goods in hand. Because with most physical goods, the cost is reduced greatly if you can get 5000 people pledging to buy your product. However I'm seeing a lot of kickstarter projects for intangible items (Just the first example I thought of). This seems odd to me. If there are no physical goods, then what start-up costs do they have, other than the time spent on the creative part. Which personally, I think the old model works just fine. Produce something, and then if it's good, I'll buy it. Most of the good kickstarter projects I've seen have a working model, they just need a bunch of money so they can buy materials in bulk and ship them out. Asking for a bunch of money to write a book, up front, is not the kind of thing I picture as something that needs to be funded on places like kickstarter.
This is the reason that CSS 2.1 isn't bug free yet in any browser. CSS 2 change list. It's a moving target. Granted there are some browsers with very terrible CSS support, but the CSS Spec is very complicated. Add that to the fact that most pages don't even start out with standards compliant HTML, so the browser has to guess what to do because you didn't close your tags properly, or you put a div inside a span.
I'd much rather just use my choice of shared hosting providers. That's decentralized enough for me. I don't want to have to leave a computer connected to the internet 24/7, nor do I want to have to worry about ensuring it doesn't have security problems. Let the pros deal with that. Granted there are some pretty shady hosting services in the race-to-the-bottom world we live in, but there are some reputable hosting companies out there. I'm all for cheap, free, ubiquitous internet, but hosting your own web presence is probably something you shouldn't bother with out of your house.
Not only that, but they can't start sending at 1 Gbps because most likely the other end couldn't handle it, and start dropping packets anyway. So they start sending slow, and have to figure out when packets are dropped to figure out which speed is the appropriate to send at, so that the file goes as fast as possible without going too fast, and having packets dropped. Most likely by the time most web files are done, they won't have even gotten up to full speed on a 1 Gbps line. Also, what is the point of 1 Gbps? In terms of networks, it's not really that fast, I mean, we've had gigabit network cards for decades. On the other end of the spectrum, most people don't even need 1 Gbps. You could easily stream HD video over 10 Mbps line. My cable company offers 75 Mbps. That's more than enough to watch 3 or 4 HD streams at once. Unless you are running a business or doing research out of your home, the current methods of delivering data to you home are already more than fast enough. Most home users are perfectly happy with something around 10 Mbps. I wouldn't mind a gigabit connection, but can't think of what use it would be to me over a 10 mbit connection.
Yeah, because taking the human out of the equation is always such a good idea. Just look at Wargames, and Dr. Strangelove.