I think this has more to do with the fact the only movies (or books, or music) that survived from 20 years ago, and you can still find were the really good ones. You don't see copies of the Super Mario Bros movie floating around everywhere, because it was a terrible movie. Nobody remembers the truly bad films, as they fade away into oblivion. Our view of past movies, books, art is skewed, because all the bad stuff disappeared.
I hardly think that youtube has a thousand database servers. Not unless they are keeping the videos in a transactional database, which would be completely insane.
Yeah, less than the cost of a single employee. And you only have to pay that once every few years, when a new version comes out, if you feel like the upgrade provides enough new features. Sure it's expensive for the start-ups. Most of them use PostgreSQL, MySQL or other free products because when you are 2 people creating a project in your free time you don't have $100,000 to drop on software. Also, your numbers are way off for SQL server. It's only $6000 per socket for standard edition, which is probably enough for most people, especially if you are just starting out.
Not sure where that number comes from, but I doubt it's that much. I saw a box of 1600 assorted bricks at Walmart for $40, and this model only hat 9500 bricks. That's only around $240 worth of bricks. Mind you, you might not have the exact bricks you want, but somehow I doubt you would have to spend 10x the amount, since from what I can see none of the bricks are anything special. I wonder if Lego accepts special orders for people taking on big projects. I be they would have sent him some bricks at a good price if he sent them a copy of his plans.
Sure, the number of tablets Apple sells as a percentage of all tablets sold will go down, but the actual number of tablets they sell keeps on going up. I don't know why people think that to be a winner in business you have to sell more than everyone else put together. People think the GameCube was a flop because the number sold wasn't as high as XBox. But Ninentod make a lot more money than Microsoft did in that generation. Apple is making money hand over fix. It doesn't matter that not everyone can afford one, as long as enough people can afford them. Not everybody can afford a BMW either, but nobody thinks there are just going to disappear.
Exactly as I said way up at the top. In the next 50 years things are going to change quite a bit. Living 50-100km from work simply won't be an option. The "niche" you are talking about are really just the early adopters. People who realize that everybody driving a personal car halfway across the city is entirely unsustainable.
Which major distributions still come with KDE as the default option. There used to be Mandrake/Mandriva, but that's pretty dead now. I guess Fedora and RedHat still use it, but RedHat is mostly for servers, so the desktop doesn't really matter that much, and I don't hear much about Fedora anymore. Seems like KDE is still very actively developed, but you have to go out of your way (Kubuntu) to even use it.
Would be something interesting if the browser vendors collected anonymous usage data though. Not even which sites you visited, but just stuff that would be useful to the developers, like page size, time to download, time to render, cache hit frequency. Obviously many people would want to turn this off, but if you got enough people using it, you could get some really interesting data. As long as you don't collect information about which sites are being visited, but rather the characteristics of the sites being loaded, I don't think people would have too much of a problem.
Protip: pack a change of clothes, and change when you get to work, and a shower isn't necessary. Sweat doesn't stink. Day old sweat stinks because the bacteria have had a long time to grow. Wipe yourself off after a bike ride with baby wipes, and change into fresh clothes, and you won't smell any worse than the guy who sweated it out on the bus, or the out of shape guy who had to walk 400 meters across the parking lot. Also you say that not everyone is in shape enough to do this, but that's only for the first couple of months. Ride your bike daily, and you'll quickly be in shape enough that it won't even effect you. With some of the right clothing and equipment, even biking in the rain isn't that much of a problem. Sure it doesn't work for absolutely everybody, but a very large percentage of people it would be completely feasible.
Also, you can make a product that is solely marketed at the urban crowd. GM has 53 models of cars (based on what they said in a recent commercial) There's enough room in that line-up for specific models for very specific uses. A half tonne pickup isn't perfect for everyone either, but they still sell them. There's 7 billion people on the planet. Even if your product only appeals to 0.1% of the population, that's still 7 million potential customers. Plenty big enough for niche products.
Yeah, and I ride my bike to work whenever weather permits (only time it doesn't permit is snow and ice, rain is no problem). Currently my ride is only 7 KM which is nice and short, but even when my ride was 25 KM, it only took an hour, which was really only 10-15 minutes longer than it took in a car, sometimes faster on a bike, depending on traffic. Cars while nice when you want to travel, aren't something that 80% of people should be using every day to get to work in a major city. It definitely isn't sustainable. In the next 50 years, I think there are going to be some hard changes that just have to be made.
Yeah, but when you go driving in a snow storm, make sure you are prepared. I'm from Canada, so this is common sense to us. Whenever driving in the winter you should have a survival kit with you, complete with blankets, food, shovel, first aid kit, chemical heat packs, matches, emergency candles, etc.... Even if you don't run out of gas or electricity, what happens if you go off the road, or a belt on your car breaks?
It's not the same as a gasoline engine. Also, everyone also mentions battery replacement costs, but doesn't think about how much maintenance could be saved over a standard internal combustion engine. No oil changes, no exhaust system problems, possibly increased brake life because stopping energy can be recycled into electricity (not sure if Tesla cars implement this, but future electric cars will). There's a whole bunch of regular maintenance that just disappears once you move to full electric cars. Also, they are much simpler machines, so many less things to break. Do they even have a transmission? I'm not sure how current it is but the wikipedia article states
There is minimal maintenance required of an electric vehicle. Because there is no internal combustion engine, there are no routine oil changes. Transmission, brake, and cooling system fluid changes will be required roughly every five to seven years or as needed. Tesla is the only automaker to offer "house calls" in which mobile service technicians perform routine software upgrades or annual inspections
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The cost of replacing the batteries (no doubt with much better batteries) a few years down the road could easily be offset by much cheaper ongoing operating costs.
Not only that, but they pretty much all look like a Palm III anyway. A few buttons on the bottom. A big screen. A grid of icons. Sure the iPhone has a color screen and multi touch, but the general look of the devices is the same.
Yes, but using music theory, one could probably discount many of those that wouldn't be considered "music". You generally don't go back and forth between 4x whole and 1/128 notes repeatedly, and you generally don't go back and forth between the highest and lowest note in the octave repeatedly. You could probably stick to anythign between hole notes and and 1/16 notes, and get the majority of the song. Also, note that as far as copyright goes, changing the pitch of a song to a different key would still be considered the same song, as would playing the song at double speed. There may be a lot of combinations of notes, but not nearly as many would be musically distinct, and also considered music.
Most PEOPLE don't have even a clue as to how the internet in general works. Honestly the lack of education with these idiots is staggering.
FTFY. Ok, but not everybody gets to decide on internet encumbering laws either, but this is the same kind of thing that happens all over the place. Crazy policies made up by pointy haired bosses that network admins need to implement, even though they don't accomplish much to anybody remotely educated in how these things work. But it stops most people . I have a neighbor, who isn't the most tech savvy person, but isn't someone I would consider completely computer illiterate either. He was telling me about this BitTorrent thing his friend just showed him. I've been using that for 7 years, and people are just now discovering this. It's like somebody walks up to me, and says, hey, did you know you can send Instant Messages to people on the internet. If they block DNS for these sites, I can bet that will stop 99% of people from accessing the sites, because most of them frankly wouldn't even know what to type into Google to solve their problem. And whatever thing they are likely to type into Google will be link farmed by scammers to get them to install virus/malware/trojan so that they can get their precious torrents.
I have a neighbor about 5 houses down who flies his model airplane around the neighborhood. It's not a small one either. Wingspan is about the width of a car, and he lands it on the road. I also don't live in the middle of nowhere. It's a residential neighborhood in the suburbs. No tall buildings around, but there's houses everywhere. The police have given him quite a few citations from what I have heard, but I'm not sure what they can do about it.
Didn't know they existed. Google should be pushing to get these marketed. They should sell them along with cell phones, for a minimal price, to get people to use them, and so developers can depend on them being there.
I"ve been saying for years that if Android really wants to take the gaming world, what they really need is some kind of standard controller with a simple d-pad and 4-6 buttons. Analog thumbstick might be nice, but probably isn't even necessary. Have some kind of mechanism so that it can physically hold the phone, and make it connect with bluetooth, and you are set. Touch screen controls work fine for angry birds, but having your fingers on the screen really cuts away from high action games, both in usable screen space, and in how well you can control the game.
There is some justification for this. Insurance is usually paid monthly, and they have some minimum amount of time before they can cut you off. They can't just cut you off because you forgot to pay a single bill. So if you have a low credit rating, there is a higher chance you will be behind on your payments, and they will still have to pay out even though you owe them money.
I agree 100%. Google just has to cover themselves so they don't get shut down completely. There's no way to police any of this, so they have an automated system. Nobody really screams that loud when a valid email gets sent to the spam filter. This is basically the same thing. If you don't like it, well, host your videos on your own web server. You don't have to worry about somebody else taking the video down without asking you. Youtube is great for teenagers posting videos of their latest skateboard tricks, but don't try to run your whole business off of it. Post content on your own servers and let people watch it from there. Also, post it on youtube as well if you want that for extra marketing and exposure, but make sure you have a site with your own content on it as well.
Nokia makes some really good hardware. And they make some really nice low end phones. Their low end "not quite smart" phones are great. You can do facebook, twitter, email, text messaging. Battery lasts forever on these things, even when doing web browsing. I charge my phone every 3 or 4 days. However, I think that we have reached the point where even the cheap ($100) Android phones are really good. So there may not be much of a market left for partly crippled not-so-smart phones with not enough apps. At least not in the first world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this has more to do with the fact the only movies (or books, or music) that survived from 20 years ago, and you can still find were the really good ones. You don't see copies of the Super Mario Bros movie floating around everywhere, because it was a terrible movie. Nobody remembers the truly bad films, as they fade away into oblivion. Our view of past movies, books, art is skewed, because all the bad stuff disappeared.
I hardly think that youtube has a thousand database servers. Not unless they are keeping the videos in a transactional database, which would be completely insane.
Yeah, less than the cost of a single employee. And you only have to pay that once every few years, when a new version comes out, if you feel like the upgrade provides enough new features. Sure it's expensive for the start-ups. Most of them use PostgreSQL, MySQL or other free products because when you are 2 people creating a project in your free time you don't have $100,000 to drop on software. Also, your numbers are way off for SQL server. It's only $6000 per socket for standard edition, which is probably enough for most people, especially if you are just starting out.
Not sure where that number comes from, but I doubt it's that much. I saw a box of 1600 assorted bricks at Walmart for $40, and this model only hat 9500 bricks. That's only around $240 worth of bricks. Mind you, you might not have the exact bricks you want, but somehow I doubt you would have to spend 10x the amount, since from what I can see none of the bricks are anything special. I wonder if Lego accepts special orders for people taking on big projects. I be they would have sent him some bricks at a good price if he sent them a copy of his plans.
Sure, the number of tablets Apple sells as a percentage of all tablets sold will go down, but the actual number of tablets they sell keeps on going up. I don't know why people think that to be a winner in business you have to sell more than everyone else put together. People think the GameCube was a flop because the number sold wasn't as high as XBox. But Ninentod make a lot more money than Microsoft did in that generation. Apple is making money hand over fix. It doesn't matter that not everyone can afford one, as long as enough people can afford them. Not everybody can afford a BMW either, but nobody thinks there are just going to disappear.
Exactly as I said way up at the top. In the next 50 years things are going to change quite a bit. Living 50-100km from work simply won't be an option. The "niche" you are talking about are really just the early adopters. People who realize that everybody driving a personal car halfway across the city is entirely unsustainable.
Serious Question
Which major distributions still come with KDE as the default option. There used to be Mandrake/Mandriva, but that's pretty dead now. I guess Fedora and RedHat still use it, but RedHat is mostly for servers, so the desktop doesn't really matter that much, and I don't hear much about Fedora anymore. Seems like KDE is still very actively developed, but you have to go out of your way (Kubuntu) to even use it.
Would be something interesting if the browser vendors collected anonymous usage data though. Not even which sites you visited, but just stuff that would be useful to the developers, like page size, time to download, time to render, cache hit frequency. Obviously many people would want to turn this off, but if you got enough people using it, you could get some really interesting data. As long as you don't collect information about which sites are being visited, but rather the characteristics of the sites being loaded, I don't think people would have too much of a problem.
Protip: pack a change of clothes, and change when you get to work, and a shower isn't necessary. Sweat doesn't stink. Day old sweat stinks because the bacteria have had a long time to grow. Wipe yourself off after a bike ride with baby wipes, and change into fresh clothes, and you won't smell any worse than the guy who sweated it out on the bus, or the out of shape guy who had to walk 400 meters across the parking lot. Also you say that not everyone is in shape enough to do this, but that's only for the first couple of months. Ride your bike daily, and you'll quickly be in shape enough that it won't even effect you. With some of the right clothing and equipment, even biking in the rain isn't that much of a problem. Sure it doesn't work for absolutely everybody, but a very large percentage of people it would be completely feasible.
Also, you can make a product that is solely marketed at the urban crowd. GM has 53 models of cars (based on what they said in a recent commercial) There's enough room in that line-up for specific models for very specific uses. A half tonne pickup isn't perfect for everyone either, but they still sell them. There's 7 billion people on the planet. Even if your product only appeals to 0.1% of the population, that's still 7 million potential customers. Plenty big enough for niche products.
Yeah, and I ride my bike to work whenever weather permits (only time it doesn't permit is snow and ice, rain is no problem). Currently my ride is only 7 KM which is nice and short, but even when my ride was 25 KM, it only took an hour, which was really only 10-15 minutes longer than it took in a car, sometimes faster on a bike, depending on traffic. Cars while nice when you want to travel, aren't something that 80% of people should be using every day to get to work in a major city. It definitely isn't sustainable. In the next 50 years, I think there are going to be some hard changes that just have to be made.
Yeah, but when you go driving in a snow storm, make sure you are prepared. I'm from Canada, so this is common sense to us. Whenever driving in the winter you should have a survival kit with you, complete with blankets, food, shovel, first aid kit, chemical heat packs, matches, emergency candles, etc.... Even if you don't run out of gas or electricity, what happens if you go off the road, or a belt on your car breaks?
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The cost of replacing the batteries (no doubt with much better batteries) a few years down the road could easily be offset by much cheaper ongoing operating costs.
Then why is there a Kindle Application for the PC?
Not only that, but they pretty much all look like a Palm III anyway. A few buttons on the bottom. A big screen. A grid of icons. Sure the iPhone has a color screen and multi touch, but the general look of the devices is the same.
Yes, but using music theory, one could probably discount many of those that wouldn't be considered "music". You generally don't go back and forth between 4x whole and 1/128 notes repeatedly, and you generally don't go back and forth between the highest and lowest note in the octave repeatedly. You could probably stick to anythign between hole notes and and 1/16 notes, and get the majority of the song. Also, note that as far as copyright goes, changing the pitch of a song to a different key would still be considered the same song, as would playing the song at double speed. There may be a lot of combinations of notes, but not nearly as many would be musically distinct, and also considered music.
The all the labels will start writing songs based on Vogon Poetry. I bet with the right marketing machine behind it, it could get quite popular.
Sorry, forgot to close my bold tag, slashdot really should warn you about that.
Most PEOPLE don't have even a clue as to how the internet in general works. Honestly the lack of education with these idiots is staggering.
FTFY. Ok, but not everybody gets to decide on internet encumbering laws either, but this is the same kind of thing that happens all over the place. Crazy policies made up by pointy haired bosses that network admins need to implement, even though they don't accomplish much to anybody remotely educated in how these things work. But it stops most people . I have a neighbor, who isn't the most tech savvy person, but isn't someone I would consider completely computer illiterate either. He was telling me about this BitTorrent thing his friend just showed him. I've been using that for 7 years, and people are just now discovering this. It's like somebody walks up to me, and says, hey, did you know you can send Instant Messages to people on the internet. If they block DNS for these sites, I can bet that will stop 99% of people from accessing the sites, because most of them frankly wouldn't even know what to type into Google to solve their problem. And whatever thing they are likely to type into Google will be link farmed by scammers to get them to install virus/malware/trojan so that they can get their precious torrents.
After I saw this episode of Auction Hunters, I'll never look at model aircraft the same way again. Amazing how elaborate model aircraft can get.
I have a neighbor about 5 houses down who flies his model airplane around the neighborhood. It's not a small one either. Wingspan is about the width of a car, and he lands it on the road. I also don't live in the middle of nowhere. It's a residential neighborhood in the suburbs. No tall buildings around, but there's houses everywhere. The police have given him quite a few citations from what I have heard, but I'm not sure what they can do about it.
Didn't know they existed. Google should be pushing to get these marketed. They should sell them along with cell phones, for a minimal price, to get people to use them, and so developers can depend on them being there.
I"ve been saying for years that if Android really wants to take the gaming world, what they really need is some kind of standard controller with a simple d-pad and 4-6 buttons. Analog thumbstick might be nice, but probably isn't even necessary. Have some kind of mechanism so that it can physically hold the phone, and make it connect with bluetooth, and you are set. Touch screen controls work fine for angry birds, but having your fingers on the screen really cuts away from high action games, both in usable screen space, and in how well you can control the game.
There is some justification for this. Insurance is usually paid monthly, and they have some minimum amount of time before they can cut you off. They can't just cut you off because you forgot to pay a single bill. So if you have a low credit rating, there is a higher chance you will be behind on your payments, and they will still have to pay out even though you owe them money.
I agree 100%. Google just has to cover themselves so they don't get shut down completely. There's no way to police any of this, so they have an automated system. Nobody really screams that loud when a valid email gets sent to the spam filter. This is basically the same thing. If you don't like it, well, host your videos on your own web server. You don't have to worry about somebody else taking the video down without asking you. Youtube is great for teenagers posting videos of their latest skateboard tricks, but don't try to run your whole business off of it. Post content on your own servers and let people watch it from there. Also, post it on youtube as well if you want that for extra marketing and exposure, but make sure you have a site with your own content on it as well.
Nokia makes some really good hardware. And they make some really nice low end phones. Their low end "not quite smart" phones are great. You can do facebook, twitter, email, text messaging. Battery lasts forever on these things, even when doing web browsing. I charge my phone every 3 or 4 days. However, I think that we have reached the point where even the cheap ($100) Android phones are really good. So there may not be much of a market left for partly crippled not-so-smart phones with not enough apps. At least not in the first world.