It's funny that nobody has made the realization of how close we humans (and the collective other animals on the planet) are von Neumann Machines... The Matrix even hints at this, when Agent Smith calls us "viruses". Perhaps we should simply look at viruses and small bacteria and how they reproduce for ideas of how to build replicating machines.
I would think it's a marvelous idea since the system's designed to store older books that are currently sitting in back rooms in card board boxes.
Sure, I'd love to see them digitized just as would anyone, but it's just not practical as of yet, where handwriting recognition software isn't quite where it needs to be, and a lot of these books need special treatment that a robot could provide a lot easier than a human could.
And if I dug under my kitchen and found it... There'd be a lot more fuss about it than a/. article...
Why the fuck did I just waste my time replying to an AC?
One of the coolest specialized robots I've seen to date is the robot that's going to be installed here at the University of Louisville as soon as they complete the renovation of the Library building. (Search for Robotic Retrieval System on your favorite search engine).
Basically it's going to be a robot to retrieve books in the library, allowing the books to be packed denser on the shelves, thus boosting the capacity of our Library by 1.2M books. This kind of technology is amazing, and we should be finding ways to push it into our lives for much more general work than that. Robotics research shouldn't have to be done by the car companies of the world.
My thoughts exactly. Imagine how much faster things would be if I could go to a McDonalds, punch in what I wanted on the screen, swipe my card, and wait for the robots to put the food together. You could reduce the staff of such an operation from ten people to two, and the food quality would be identical. Of course, this would also be upfront cost for the companies, and would hurt the economy undoubtedly as it would require the firing of multiple thousands of people, but we'd have a progress in technology.
I guess to sum it up best, I WANT MY DAMNED FLYING CAR.
Is that the only companies willing to do any practical research in robotics is car companies because they use robotics on such a daily basis (the building of cars, of course).
Not only that, robotics is one of the most fun branches of modern computing and engineering, and yet so few engineers actually go into it. It's a shame we aren't meeting up with more robots in real life (Fast foods should be relegated to robotics by now, as the food quality tends to resemble it)...
Sorry grammar nazi's I don't use preview. I meant "They simply progress as newer versions of P6"... Slashdot really needs to get with the 90's and add an edit button.
P6 = Archetecture that PIII, PII and PPro use. No one processor can be quantified as P6. That is why the Pentium M is not a Pentium III is not a Pentium II is not a Pentium Pro. They are simply progress as newer versions of P6.
So if/when you say "they re-released a Pentium 3 as a Pentium M", you are wrong. They took out a schematic for the P6 archetecture (probably the Tualatin's last spec), found a way to add in some of Pentium 4's technology (branch prediction unit update, SSE2, micro-op fusion), some all together new technology (Speedstep 3), and released the Pentium M. To the layman, the former may sound correct, but there's a subtle interpretation difference that makes it sound like they put absolutely no work into the process.
As of right now, I can't find the link to where they have done it, but Intel has said that they "doubt there will be an Itanium 3", due to market pressure from the AMD Athlon 64, the fact that people would rather buy a crufty old x86 processor than the new IA64, the fact Microsoft will no longer support it, and the fact that HP has quit out of their side of the partnership.
Besides all of that, it's simply not worth the money, as an array of IBM's 970's is faster (as Apple has shown through their G5 platform), cheaper, and more efficient to code for (as it's a lot simpler to port code from 32bit PPC->64bit PPC than it is 32bit x86->64bit IA64).
And while you are not likely to pay anything less for a silent computer, there are 10 other people out there who will pay for a computer that will sit nicely on a shelf in the Entertainment center, hook up to their TV, and record their favorite TV shows for them.. Just as long as it doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner.
Hell, I'd buy a silent computer too if I could get one with the same amount of power as my current desktop. It definitely would help with my sleep as it now sounds like a fully qualified Hoover, and I can't really afford to keep it off at night (bootup time, servers, webcam, file sharing, yadda).
The Mac Mini is a great little PC because it brings people to Apple, sells off the iPod marketing scheme, and is CHEAP. Don't knock it until you try it.
The problem is the Pentium M is not a Pentium III, but is based off of P6 (the same core archetecture dating all the way back to the Pentium Pro).
They didn't really underhype the Pentium M, the M is for mobile, and that's exactly where it was aimed and designed for. They hyped it as the "Centrino platform", and it has sold like hotcakes in most modern laptops.
The real issue is why it took so damned long for Intel to move Pentium M to *desktop* use. The minute they cancelled Itanium's whole branch, they should have moved Pentium 4/Xeon up to its role as the server processor, and moved the Pentium M to the desktop; instead they waited and let AMD get the competitive edge on them with the Athlon 64.
I commend AMD for their forcing the market to keep moving, but I also hope Intel becomes more responsive and keeps its wheels spinning so that we can see technology keep moving, and not stagnate as it has the past two years.
Good thing W3C.org is full of tests for each of the standards you mention.
PS, it all could be done in one page, since no test excludes another, AFAIK. It'd just be one bitch of a webpage to code, to load, and to read the results from.
And you were the exact person I was afraid would reply to my comment, but I have been preparing for you, so let's rumble.
Compiling is a task well suited for distribution, unlike most. Development can be done at any dumb terminal anywhere, and doesn't require you to have your own machine to do the work. If you ask most developers, they telnet into a server anyways, so this isn't going to be some big inconvience to them.
Ah next up, the big one, games. Let's rework your calculations a bit, since they're a bit.. shady to say the least. Most monitor's MAXIMUM supported resolution is 1600x1200 (17" Dell Crapmon). Most people run games at 800x600, so let's shoot the gap at 1200x768. A 1200x768 image is 921k pixels. In most systems with 32bit colors, means that we need 12 bits per pixel for color, or simply, four bytes. 4 x 921k = 3M. Okay, it's sounding bad isn't it? Let's continute. To play a video game, we only need 30 frames per second? Why? Because our eyes can't see better than that, unless you are a fighter pilot or a mutant, both of which don't have the time to play video games every day. So we're at 110M/sec ish. OH WAIT, I think I forgot to mention something we do to images before we send them over a network connection. What's that you ask? COMPRESSION. Using a streaming MPEG-type compression algorithm, we effectively reduce that 110M/second to say, 30M/sec, give or take 10M (240Mbits/sec). So while you overshoot the bandwidth requirements by more than 10x, I can understand your concern in this department. Bandwidth ISN'T cheap now, but as Fiber to the Home matures, and media companies move towards web-based data, bandwidth costs will go down. Also, the data we're working with isn't scientific, and I'm fairly certain I'd want to drop the framerate to 24 frames a second, and use a much more aggressive video compression algorithm and a fairly smaller resolution mode (Hell, I don't use greater than 1024x768 for most games).
For backups, I don't see your point at all. EULAs can say that you're responsible for your own data, but that would defeat the purpose. If they lose your data, they're responsible and they can and should be sued. But since any competent company will take care of their customers and their data, this isn't a problem.
Lastly, the problem I speak of comes from consumeristic society. Google's servers are a order of magnitude more environmentally safe: They're likely to stay on the rack for 10-20 years, they're newer computers so they're built to better environmentally safe specifications, they don't get replaced bi-yearly, they (most likely) do not use monitors (hell, why would they? someone can administrate the server 2000 miles away from a dumb terminal), with NO sound hardware, NO video hardware. If you're trying to tell me it's more environmentally sound to build 1000 desktop computers, monitors, keyboards and mice, than to build 200 servers, 20 switches (most of which are backup), a few hundred feet of cable, then you've got serious issues.
Forgive me for saying this, but when it comes to who has more money to throw at more expensive hardware would the answer to that question be "you" or "MassiveVirtualGamingCompany(tm)(R)"?
Your own statement validates the fact that a game needs more resources, and if a company ran a server farm of a few hunred thousand computers, they could afford to run the client graphics processing better than the consumer could ever afford, and then simply send those images to the user's terminal at a rate of 30 images per second down an internet pipe. Sure, that's a hell of a lot of bandwidth, I know, but we're ignoring that, because we can pass off the cost of bandwidth as being the trade off cost for the price of the computer you would instead have to purchase to run the game.
Imagine having graphics that are BETTER than Doom 3 set on its highest detail setting. How would that be possible you say? Simple, throw more computers at it. There's a limit to how fast you could make it, yes, but in all, they could afford to process the frames for you, and send them to your computer. Personally, I'm amazed a service like this isn't already available, as since it'd be cheaper to pay a company $20/month than to pay $1200 to get your computer up to spec to play some game you'll be bored with two months into the future anyways. Of course, that can be argued until the cows come home, so I won't touch that right now.
Linux's Kernel is not likely to be forked mainly thanks to it's great management. Where plenty of projects get forked, its usually because a) the developers can't make up their minds on a certain way to implement on something, so they fork to try both ways, b) there are political differences within the faction of developers (GPL vs BSD, Portability vs Speed of Development, etc), and finally c) a fork is created to work on things outside of the realm of the original project.
In the Kernel's management, a is taken care of by a vote or by a maintainer saying it's going to be one way, and not taking too hard an edge on it. We can already see "microforks" happening based on these decisions, like Redhat backporting features from the 2.6 kernel because they didn't like some of the choices going into 2.6.
Luckly, b hasn't happened yet, where two groups are adamantly and dimetricly opposed on a topic, and will not budge. And c happens all the time, and is even encoraged (everyone is allowed to make their own "patches", which, if good enough, can eventually find their way back to the kernel.
So forking can be a bad thing, especially in case b, where the developers fragment and a project breaks down, but in most cases, I agree with you that forking can be a good thing. It's all about the management!
I'm glad you brought up iTunes. As a happy customer, I find it odd that when you buy a song, you download a copy of it. Hear me out.
Typically, when we buy something, we either expect to have something physically given to us, or expect a service rendered for us. In the case of how iTunes works now, it is the former; they give you a copy of the song. If you lose it, tough cookies. Buy another one.
How I would imagine iTunes would work (if it hadn't existed yet), would be me paying for a song, and then having the ability to listen to it whenever I want. This would mean that whatever computer I went to and typed in my user information, I could obtain a copy of the song to listen to it.
How does this fit in with the current topic of discussion? Future media, I think, will work the way of the latter. In this case, iTunes will just have to update their software a little bit to become compliant.
At least it's interesting to think about. And if we start paying for our content/entertainment, maybe we can do away with those damned popup advertisments, TV commercials, and other horribly obtrusive advertising things.
The answer to that is simple: Why give up what you have now?
Your computer that you own currently is the future thin client. Before long, it's going to be too slow to do anything on its own, and the old software you have now will run fine on it for quite some time. Oh, and with multiple gigabyte hard drives, I think you can safely keep whatever personal information you might have (Hell, I think I could keep most of my "personal information" on a 8 meg flash card).
I just think you're being a bit pedantic/possessive.
I dunno about you, but GMail was the killer-app for me.
Free, virtually unlimited email storage, accessable from anywhere with an internet connection. Hell, if they spruced up their address book/contacts a bit, integrate a calendar based off the ICS spec (think iCal/Mozilla Sunbird/Mozilla), and I'd stay with Google for life.
I think you are one of the few users left that would be delegated to having their own machine. In the past, computers were so expensive that an office may only have three, and probably two of those were setup for everyone to use (or at least, they were in my Dad's office in the late 80's). Those who had their own computer were doing work which required them to have access to the comptuer every day, like writing software or something.
Today, think of the benefits from PC virtualization: compiling would be done over a huge grid of computers, video games would be faster because the client/server communications barrier would no longer exist (well, it still would exist, but it'd mostly be sending images to the user's computer, and then the user sending short commands back), all your data would be automatically backed up and secured, and the world would have less environmental damage due to outdated computers with lead parts.
I think it'll work for yahoo, a lot better than it did for Google.
Yahoo! is a company based more around keeping users on the site, and Google, quite the opposite. Yahoo! has launch to tie in to Geocities to tie into their new AdSense-like program, so they can now build a system like Orkut, and have it be wildly successful.
Plus, I think they already have a wildly established user group; those people who are currently not using LiveJournal or some other alternative, and who are editing static geocities pages to make a blog. Don't count them out; I have a number of friends that still blog this way, and they say they hate it, but they're blogs are established, they have friends that know the URL, and they simply have no incentive to move away from Yahoo!.
I do believe, however, than an invite-based system is foolish. It worked for Gmail because they needed a slowly growing userbase (unlike what you said). They wanted to make sure their servers could take the load as they slowly wrote more software for the Gmail system. Same with Orkut, only their servers are a good deal worse; I've actually had people Instant Message me saying "Oh no, I think I helped crash the Orkut server again".
So don't count this new fangled groupware stuff out. Yahoo's a bit behind in the game, but they're still in the game. Hopefully it'll just force Google to keep innovating and not sit back on their stock cash cow (which they REALLY need to do a 5:1 stock split or something, who the hell's gonna by a $180 dollar stock of a web-based company???).
Tired or not tired, you should see that Apple isn't sticking the "innovation" label on a minor product.
In fact, Apple isn't sticking ANY label on it, since this came from a rumor website on what Apple may or may not be developing.
That being said, they're probably using the same source as De Plume did, and they might get their asses handed to them on a silver platter as well if they aren't careful.
I find the fact there's only one button a blessing.
In the PC world, I could never figure out which button to use on a laptop, mainly because I use a left-handed mouse on my PC at home, and most laptops are set up in a right handed configuration. That always caused frustration when you were trying to submit a form on a website, or bring down a context menu from a link and end up pressing the link.
On my iBook, the difference is much more apparent, and I can use either my left or my right hand, equally comfortably.
Oh, and in case you were wondering why I use a left-handed mouse while I'm right handed, my right wrist is fused (kinda like carpal tunnel, only my entire wrist is fused).
Slashdot Mirror
Good name for a company, IMO.
It's funny that nobody has made the realization of how close we humans (and the collective other animals on the planet) are von Neumann Machines... The Matrix even hints at this, when Agent Smith calls us "viruses". Perhaps we should simply look at viruses and small bacteria and how they reproduce for ideas of how to build replicating machines.
I would think it's a marvelous idea since the system's designed to store older books that are currently sitting in back rooms in card board boxes.
/. article...
Sure, I'd love to see them digitized just as would anyone, but it's just not practical as of yet, where handwriting recognition software isn't quite where it needs to be, and a lot of these books need special treatment that a robot could provide a lot easier than a human could.
And if I dug under my kitchen and found it... There'd be a lot more fuss about it than a
Why the fuck did I just waste my time replying to an AC?
Laundry, no. But you could probably attach a buggy to it and have it carry it for you.
;).
Walk the dog? Sure! Attach the leash to the unit and let it pull.
Cook your meals? Perhaps if it were modified with a flipper arm and a dunking arm, and a voice module to say "Would you like fries with that?"
It may not be up to part for Wife 1.0, but hell if it isn't a good pet
One of the coolest specialized robots I've seen to date is the robot that's going to be installed here at the University of Louisville as soon as they complete the renovation of the Library building. (Search for Robotic Retrieval System on your favorite search engine).
Basically it's going to be a robot to retrieve books in the library, allowing the books to be packed denser on the shelves, thus boosting the capacity of our Library by 1.2M books. This kind of technology is amazing, and we should be finding ways to push it into our lives for much more general work than that. Robotics research shouldn't have to be done by the car companies of the world.
My thoughts exactly. Imagine how much faster things would be if I could go to a McDonalds, punch in what I wanted on the screen, swipe my card, and wait for the robots to put the food together. You could reduce the staff of such an operation from ten people to two, and the food quality would be identical. Of course, this would also be upfront cost for the companies, and would hurt the economy undoubtedly as it would require the firing of multiple thousands of people, but we'd have a progress in technology.
I guess to sum it up best, I WANT MY DAMNED FLYING CAR.
Is that the only companies willing to do any practical research in robotics is car companies because they use robotics on such a daily basis (the building of cars, of course).
Not only that, robotics is one of the most fun branches of modern computing and engineering, and yet so few engineers actually go into it. It's a shame we aren't meeting up with more robots in real life (Fast foods should be relegated to robotics by now, as the food quality tends to resemble it)...
They are simply progress as newer versions of P6.
Sorry grammar nazi's I don't use preview. I meant "They simply progress as newer versions of P6"... Slashdot really needs to get with the 90's and add an edit button.
P6 = Archetecture that PIII, PII and PPro use. No one processor can be quantified as P6. That is why the Pentium M is not a Pentium III is not a Pentium II is not a Pentium Pro. They are simply progress as newer versions of P6.
So if/when you say "they re-released a Pentium 3 as a Pentium M", you are wrong. They took out a schematic for the P6 archetecture (probably the Tualatin's last spec), found a way to add in some of Pentium 4's technology (branch prediction unit update, SSE2, micro-op fusion), some all together new technology (Speedstep 3), and released the Pentium M. To the layman, the former may sound correct, but there's a subtle interpretation difference that makes it sound like they put absolutely no work into the process.
As of right now, I can't find the link to where they have done it, but Intel has said that they "doubt there will be an Itanium 3", due to market pressure from the AMD Athlon 64, the fact that people would rather buy a crufty old x86 processor than the new IA64, the fact Microsoft will no longer support it, and the fact that HP has quit out of their side of the partnership.
Besides all of that, it's simply not worth the money, as an array of IBM's 970's is faster (as Apple has shown through their G5 platform), cheaper, and more efficient to code for (as it's a lot simpler to port code from 32bit PPC->64bit PPC than it is 32bit x86->64bit IA64).
If only VB were a F/OSS project
oh NO!!. DON'T GIVE THEM ANY IDEAS!!!!
And while you are not likely to pay anything less for a silent computer, there are 10 other people out there who will pay for a computer that will sit nicely on a shelf in the Entertainment center, hook up to their TV, and record their favorite TV shows for them.. Just as long as it doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner.
Hell, I'd buy a silent computer too if I could get one with the same amount of power as my current desktop. It definitely would help with my sleep as it now sounds like a fully qualified Hoover, and I can't really afford to keep it off at night (bootup time, servers, webcam, file sharing, yadda).
The Mac Mini is a great little PC because it brings people to Apple, sells off the iPod marketing scheme, and is CHEAP. Don't knock it until you try it.
The problem is the Pentium M is not a Pentium III, but is based off of P6 (the same core archetecture dating all the way back to the Pentium Pro).
They didn't really underhype the Pentium M, the M is for mobile, and that's exactly where it was aimed and designed for. They hyped it as the "Centrino platform", and it has sold like hotcakes in most modern laptops.
The real issue is why it took so damned long for Intel to move Pentium M to *desktop* use. The minute they cancelled Itanium's whole branch, they should have moved Pentium 4/Xeon up to its role as the server processor, and moved the Pentium M to the desktop; instead they waited and let AMD get the competitive edge on them with the Athlon 64.
I commend AMD for their forcing the market to keep moving, but I also hope Intel becomes more responsive and keeps its wheels spinning so that we can see technology keep moving, and not stagnate as it has the past two years.
Good thing W3C.org is full of tests for each of the standards you mention.
PS, it all could be done in one page, since no test excludes another, AFAIK. It'd just be one bitch of a webpage to code, to load, and to read the results from.
And you were the exact person I was afraid would reply to my comment, but I have been preparing for you, so let's rumble.
Compiling is a task well suited for distribution, unlike most. Development can be done at any dumb terminal anywhere, and doesn't require you to have your own machine to do the work. If you ask most developers, they telnet into a server anyways, so this isn't going to be some big inconvience to them.
Ah next up, the big one, games. Let's rework your calculations a bit, since they're a bit.. shady to say the least. Most monitor's MAXIMUM supported resolution is 1600x1200 (17" Dell Crapmon). Most people run games at 800x600, so let's shoot the gap at 1200x768. A 1200x768 image is 921k pixels. In most systems with 32bit colors, means that we need 12 bits per pixel for color, or simply, four bytes. 4 x 921k = 3M. Okay, it's sounding bad isn't it? Let's continute. To play a video game, we only need 30 frames per second? Why? Because our eyes can't see better than that, unless you are a fighter pilot or a mutant, both of which don't have the time to play video games every day. So we're at 110M/sec ish. OH WAIT, I think I forgot to mention something we do to images before we send them over a network connection. What's that you ask? COMPRESSION. Using a streaming MPEG-type compression algorithm, we effectively reduce that 110M/second to say, 30M/sec, give or take 10M (240Mbits/sec). So while you overshoot the bandwidth requirements by more than 10x, I can understand your concern in this department. Bandwidth ISN'T cheap now, but as Fiber to the Home matures, and media companies move towards web-based data, bandwidth costs will go down. Also, the data we're working with isn't scientific, and I'm fairly certain I'd want to drop the framerate to 24 frames a second, and use a much more aggressive video compression algorithm and a fairly smaller resolution mode (Hell, I don't use greater than 1024x768 for most games).
For backups, I don't see your point at all. EULAs can say that you're responsible for your own data, but that would defeat the purpose. If they lose your data, they're responsible and they can and should be sued. But since any competent company will take care of their customers and their data, this isn't a problem.
Lastly, the problem I speak of comes from consumeristic society. Google's servers are a order of magnitude more environmentally safe: They're likely to stay on the rack for 10-20 years, they're newer computers so they're built to better environmentally safe specifications, they don't get replaced bi-yearly, they (most likely) do not use monitors (hell, why would they? someone can administrate the server 2000 miles away from a dumb terminal), with NO sound hardware, NO video hardware. If you're trying to tell me it's more environmentally sound to build 1000 desktop computers, monitors, keyboards and mice, than to build 200 servers, 20 switches (most of which are backup), a few hundred feet of cable, then you've got serious issues.
Forgive me for saying this, but when it comes to who has more money to throw at more expensive hardware would the answer to that question be "you" or "MassiveVirtualGamingCompany(tm)(R)"?
Your own statement validates the fact that a game needs more resources, and if a company ran a server farm of a few hunred thousand computers, they could afford to run the client graphics processing better than the consumer could ever afford, and then simply send those images to the user's terminal at a rate of 30 images per second down an internet pipe. Sure, that's a hell of a lot of bandwidth, I know, but we're ignoring that, because we can pass off the cost of bandwidth as being the trade off cost for the price of the computer you would instead have to purchase to run the game.
Imagine having graphics that are BETTER than Doom 3 set on its highest detail setting. How would that be possible you say? Simple, throw more computers at it. There's a limit to how fast you could make it, yes, but in all, they could afford to process the frames for you, and send them to your computer. Personally, I'm amazed a service like this isn't already available, as since it'd be cheaper to pay a company $20/month than to pay $1200 to get your computer up to spec to play some game you'll be bored with two months into the future anyways. Of course, that can be argued until the cows come home, so I won't touch that right now.
Linux's Kernel is not likely to be forked mainly thanks to it's great management. Where plenty of projects get forked, its usually because a) the developers can't make up their minds on a certain way to implement on something, so they fork to try both ways, b) there are political differences within the faction of developers (GPL vs BSD, Portability vs Speed of Development, etc), and finally c) a fork is created to work on things outside of the realm of the original project.
In the Kernel's management, a is taken care of by a vote or by a maintainer saying it's going to be one way, and not taking too hard an edge on it. We can already see "microforks" happening based on these decisions, like Redhat backporting features from the 2.6 kernel because they didn't like some of the choices going into 2.6.
Luckly, b hasn't happened yet, where two groups are adamantly and dimetricly opposed on a topic, and will not budge. And c happens all the time, and is even encoraged (everyone is allowed to make their own "patches", which, if good enough, can eventually find their way back to the kernel.
So forking can be a bad thing, especially in case b, where the developers fragment and a project breaks down, but in most cases, I agree with you that forking can be a good thing. It's all about the management!
I'm glad you brought up iTunes. As a happy customer, I find it odd that when you buy a song, you download a copy of it. Hear me out.
Typically, when we buy something, we either expect to have something physically given to us, or expect a service rendered for us. In the case of how iTunes works now, it is the former; they give you a copy of the song. If you lose it, tough cookies. Buy another one.
How I would imagine iTunes would work (if it hadn't existed yet), would be me paying for a song, and then having the ability to listen to it whenever I want. This would mean that whatever computer I went to and typed in my user information, I could obtain a copy of the song to listen to it.
How does this fit in with the current topic of discussion? Future media, I think, will work the way of the latter. In this case, iTunes will just have to update their software a little bit to become compliant.
At least it's interesting to think about. And if we start paying for our content/entertainment, maybe we can do away with those damned popup advertisments, TV commercials, and other horribly obtrusive advertising things.
The answer to that is simple: Why give up what you have now?
Your computer that you own currently is the future thin client. Before long, it's going to be too slow to do anything on its own, and the old software you have now will run fine on it for quite some time. Oh, and with multiple gigabyte hard drives, I think you can safely keep whatever personal information you might have (Hell, I think I could keep most of my "personal information" on a 8 meg flash card).
I just think you're being a bit pedantic/possessive.
I dunno about you, but GMail was the killer-app for me.
Free, virtually unlimited email storage, accessable from anywhere with an internet connection. Hell, if they spruced up their address book/contacts a bit, integrate a calendar based off the ICS spec (think iCal/Mozilla Sunbird/Mozilla), and I'd stay with Google for life.
I think you are one of the few users left that would be delegated to having their own machine. In the past, computers were so expensive that an office may only have three, and probably two of those were setup for everyone to use (or at least, they were in my Dad's office in the late 80's). Those who had their own computer were doing work which required them to have access to the comptuer every day, like writing software or something.
Today, think of the benefits from PC virtualization: compiling would be done over a huge grid of computers, video games would be faster because the client/server communications barrier would no longer exist (well, it still would exist, but it'd mostly be sending images to the user's computer, and then the user sending short commands back), all your data would be automatically backed up and secured, and the world would have less environmental damage due to outdated computers with lead parts.
Embrace the wave.
I think it'll work for yahoo, a lot better than it did for Google.
Yahoo! is a company based more around keeping users on the site, and Google, quite the opposite. Yahoo! has launch to tie in to Geocities to tie into their new AdSense-like program, so they can now build a system like Orkut, and have it be wildly successful.
Plus, I think they already have a wildly established user group; those people who are currently not using LiveJournal or some other alternative, and who are editing static geocities pages to make a blog. Don't count them out; I have a number of friends that still blog this way, and they say they hate it, but they're blogs are established, they have friends that know the URL, and they simply have no incentive to move away from Yahoo!.
I do believe, however, than an invite-based system is foolish. It worked for Gmail because they needed a slowly growing userbase (unlike what you said). They wanted to make sure their servers could take the load as they slowly wrote more software for the Gmail system. Same with Orkut, only their servers are a good deal worse; I've actually had people Instant Message me saying "Oh no, I think I helped crash the Orkut server again".
So don't count this new fangled groupware stuff out. Yahoo's a bit behind in the game, but they're still in the game. Hopefully it'll just force Google to keep innovating and not sit back on their stock cash cow (which they REALLY need to do a 5:1 stock split or something, who the hell's gonna by a $180 dollar stock of a web-based company???).
Tired or not tired, you should see that Apple isn't sticking the "innovation" label on a minor product.
In fact, Apple isn't sticking ANY label on it, since this came from a rumor website on what Apple may or may not be developing.
That being said, they're probably using the same source as De Plume did, and they might get their asses handed to them on a silver platter as well if they aren't careful.
I find the fact there's only one button a blessing.
In the PC world, I could never figure out which button to use on a laptop, mainly because I use a left-handed mouse on my PC at home, and most laptops are set up in a right handed configuration. That always caused frustration when you were trying to submit a form on a website, or bring down a context menu from a link and end up pressing the link.
On my iBook, the difference is much more apparent, and I can use either my left or my right hand, equally comfortably.
Oh, and in case you were wondering why I use a left-handed mouse while I'm right handed, my right wrist is fused (kinda like carpal tunnel, only my entire wrist is fused).
What the hell is a floppy drive?
Sincerely,
Me, circa 2004..5