Its not like a heart which you have to keep alive between the donor and recipient.
More to the point, it's not something which needs a stringent donor match as do current transplant techniques. With the relatively vast donor pool, there's no need to develop a synthetic collagen scaffold just to be able to apply this stem cell technique broadly.
Yes, but in the US this concept has spiraled out of control. It's gone beyond mere protection for the wronged into a massive chilling effect on society. But Philip K. Howard says it far better than I: Four ways to fix a broken legal system.
Lovely, another case of life imitates sci-fi. This development reminds me a bit of the superconductors in some of Larry Niven's books (esp. the Ringworld series). In addition to being an electrical superconductor this material was also a thermal superconductor -- and was used as a sort of sci-fi super heatsink on a few occasions. It was mostly represented by ultra-strong threads, and occasionally a woven cloth IIRC.
Start-up time isn't very significant - I generally leave browsers running all the time.
Motion seconded. I find this metric pointless in isolation, since the actual browser startup time is dwarfed by reloading persisted tabs across sessions. User-facing startup time for me is effectively (app startup + time to load up needed tab(s)). Tab persistence is an absolutely must-have feature as far as I'm concerned -- the browser can crash, I can close the browser, or even shutdown the machine without "losing my place".
And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces? Will they pay Nokia for developing cell phones and smart phones for years? Hypocrisy is the one of the most despicable traits imaginable. This lawsuit has that coming out of it's ears.
Hypocrisy? In standard patent position saber-rattling? WTF? Either {Xerox, Nokia, etc.} have active patents that cover tech in use by Apple and successfully enforces same... or they don't. If they don't have active and enforceable patents, then those technologies are available for anyone to implement themselves. That's how patents work. The problems with patents have been well trod on these pages, but it's *stupid beyond belief* to just ignore the existing system and get legally screwed by your competitors. If we're talking up the Hierarchy of Stupidity, wishful misrepresentation of reality is *way* worse than mere hypocrisy. Not liking the system is no excuse for not understanding it, especially if you want to become an advocate of change.
Likewise, some poster above suggested that Apple should just pay Nokia its royalties. That's also stupid. Apple (or any company, really) should leverage its patent portfolio into cross-licensing deals. If potential negotiators aren't coming to the table, then standard tactics are to force the issue with suits. Everyone does their legal calculations, and for the most part folks come to the negotiating table and work things out. Trying to read some sort of morality into all of this is like trying to ascribe good and evil to a chess match in the park. Let's leave discussion of right and wrong in the system where it belongs, with the rule making process -- the legislature and those who elect them.
If someone is so incapable of using a computer without fucking it up, they don't need a "locked down appliance", they just need to be kept the hell away from computers period. It's akin to saying that "we just need self-driving cars" for incompetent drivers as opposed to just keeping them from getting behind the wheel.
You spoiled little brat. You can't even spin any fiber into thread/yarn, much less weave it into useful fabric or make clothes! You shouldn't even be allowed to wear clothes! Freeze, ya limey bastard!
There now. History shows that you're being a twit. A major early impact of the industrial revolution was that it stopped the need for virtually *everyone*, regardless of gender, age, etc. to be involved in textile production just to have clothes on their back. Spare time wasn't "spare": you were spinning fiber, male or female, old or young. In short time, those skills practically vanished from the industrialized world due to mass-produced textile products. (It's worth noting that these still are still part of daily life in many places today.)
In that vein, there's vast room for improvement in computer usability, security, and maintainability. For example, we've been stuck in the WIMP era (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers), as if that's the be-all, end-all of computer interfaces. Time for some fresh ideas there -- put into production, not just as academic exercises. Eventually many of the "computing skills" we understand now will be as obsolete as floppy disks. It doesn't even matter whether iPad (or ChromeOS, or...) is "it" or not, just that the ice has been broken. Heed the wake-up call: one-size-fits-all computing is dead. Enter cellphones, Kindles, iPads, PSPs, DSs, and many tools we haven't even thought of yet.
some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product.
It doesn't take a "battalion of lawyers". It just takes a working relationship with qualified legal counsel, who is knowledgable in modern software copyright issues. It used to be that such folks were scarce as hen's teeth, but now you mostly just have to know enough to ask for and retain the right attorney or firm, on the terms appropriate for your size of business. Development will need to participate, but mostly this comes down to educating the team(s) to percolate up requests like: "hey, I'd like to use package X which has license Y, is that license OK?" This query either hits cache ("license Y is known to be {good,bad}"), or misses and becomes a review request to an attorney.
Computers are not fairy dust. One does not sprinkle "computers" on a problem to make the problem go away. They are simply tools that can be applied to solve a wide variety of problems -- but only work well when a real-world problem domain is understood by those attempting a solution. So much of "computers in education" have been ill-informed stabs in the dark by those who either don't understand the problem (and therefore relevant solutions) and/or who simply want to make money by selling solutions without regard to problems.
That said, computers are already transforming education because we're finally at the point where we can change the affordances of education. Consider the experience of having both good vs bad instructor/professors. As online video and remote classroom technologies improve, we're increasingly able to simply put all of the students in "the good prof's class" -- even though he or she is on the other side of the continent. You could be in the Big Lecture Hall with the bad prof, or have a world-class "+5 Insightful" instructor available via your computer. For live classes, this comes with the same Q&A opportunities as a standard classroom (more tech well-applied). For previously recorded classes, students get the benefit of review opportunities that never existed in a traditional class. Or in many cases, students can attend a live lecture with complete "recall" of the lecture material provided by increasingly good online presentation of the lecture video and notes.
What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?
By whom? For what purpose? You're implicitly invoking The Mysterious Them (the planners), but actual people and/or organizations of people need to do the footwork. Things inhibiting game developers targeting Linux include:
Too small of a market. The market must be sized so as to support the development and QA effort required for the port. For a long time, Mac games would be brought over by a third-party porting shop working with the original publisher of what was usually a Windows-targeted game. This effectively provided a measure risk protection for the publisher -- with some of both risk and reward going to the porting house. It's telling that this doesn't seem to happen for Linux distros. Do even very small porting houses find it untenable to recoup costs?
Market fragmentation due to "Linux" not actually being a single targetable platform for gaming. A game dev shop could perhaps target one or two specific releases of specific distros, but that fragments the market further. See the previous item.
What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?
[sarcasm]Forecast calls for discussion turning into occasional badgering with signs of whimpering and pleading in the afternoon.[/sarcasm]
More seriously, this requires convincing the GPU makers that the investment in providing Linux drivers will have sufficient net return. Note that "sufficient" is a hurdle well beyond just breaking even. There has to be enough return to cover the opportunity costs involved for the dev effort. I.e. could those devs have been doing something other than Linux drivers that would have made the company more money? Maybe even a lot more money?
One of the aspects of why plagiarism is seen as wrong is because you're taking credit for someone else's work.
This reminds me of a policy for handling plagiarism (in CS classes, as it happens) I heard about some years back. In summary, the offense was converted to not citing your sources. I recall that the penalty was quite severe, along the lines of a major final grade penalty or perhaps disciplinary action. However, if you cited your sources, you got credit for the portion of the work you did independently. That is, for what value you added. This system changed the economics of plagiarism such that it was vastly reduced, and weasel-wording by caught students was virtually eliminated. Interestingly, students found it much less risky to simply cite one's sources (even when copying an entire assignment!) than to risk the all-or-nothing path. Some enterprising students even found ways to bring in and leverage other works to achieve interesting goals that didn't damage their grade.
This is a case where I really want to "vote against" a movie project before it hits the theaters. I'd love a well-crafted realization of the Foundation books on screen, but not a movie by a Hollywood hack producing something without any vision broader than trading CG whizbang for cash. The opportunity cost of having to wait until this mess is forgotten and the rights end up in competent hands is just too damn high: it's probably a matter of waiting until the practically-endless copyright expires. Fsckers.
There's no reason that a Foundation movie (to stay in-genre) shouldn't be at least as thought provoking as, say, Blade Runner.
Better living through non-chemistry. I'll bet this can be adapted to target clothes moths and case-making moths, the two species responsible for textile (and other) damage. The things are pernicious; very difficult to remove from a home with an infestation. Perhaps even make the zapper more effective by using it to cover the area where a pheremone trap is located (to draw adults into the kill zone).
If only Intel were willing to bet the company on it, about 10 years ago, we would all be using it today.
IMO, Intel borked the IA-64 nee EPIC architectural effort in the design stage. It's informative to compare the IA-64 architectural approach to that of the TI C67xx series of VLIW DSPs chips. There's certainly some apples and oranges in there, but the TI VLIW chips showed the possibility of a parallel ISA that is simple, effective, and targetable (i.e. both humans and compilers could generate good code) -- and at a similar point in time to Intel's own efforts. Cell would be another interesting point of comparison with the above two architectures.
At the time, IA-64's design implied "we're Intel, we can make things as complicated as we want!"... and this hubris persisted without regard to implementation concerns such as design time due to said complexity (which effectively killed Itanium) and the enormous die-area suck for the massive hardware controller. It's also unclear to me whether proper concern was given to good compiler-chip synergies in this architecture, which are generally key to good performance. Frankly, I think we're *much* better off with the current multi-core path than we ever would have been with the conceptually bloated mess that was the Itanic.
That's where I stopped reading. I'm on a no-buzzword diet.
Excellent! More enjoyable and better paying work (and better co-workers) for the rest of us clued enough to realize when there's real substance behind those buzzwords. Have fun with that self ghettoizing!
It's not about having an editor or not having an editor. A good editor is a member of a team focused on producing a great creative work.
Instead, these types of fights were about the restrictions of the entrenched format -- how many panels, how formatted, how big, how often. And that's not even considering the lowest common denominator factor of a VERY bandwidth restricted medium -- two-ish pages for weekday comics, with a bit more room for the Sunday funnies. The decision to drop a comic or add a comic was a notable one for most papers; no decision would keep everyone happy.
Maybe there are web comics out there that would do well with an editor, but there are a number of great ones that seem to get along far better than their print counterparts by way of art, creativity, and storytelling.
But the iPad is unlocked out of the gate -- no contract and no provider lock-in. Whether or not AT&T gets a cut, these data plans create interesting competitive price pressure.
It behaves predictably across editors and allows easy changing of width for various programmers.
I'm amazed that you can utter this with a straight face. "behaves predictably" and "allows easy changing of width" are pretty much diametrically opposed concepts, at least if you actually share your code with any other human being. If tab-width were somehow a universally self-describing attribute in text files, then this could fly. But without it, we're left in a place where others viewing your code open the file (or heaven forbid, use cat/more/less!) and then feel fscked.
I'll also observe that a number of popular editors don't even have clean per-project (or per-file) concepts of tab-width setting and such settings are often clunky in the best of those that do.
If I'm hitting the tab key and it's inserting X spaces, and I hit the key once too many times, I have to hit delete X times instead of just once.
This is only true if your editor is being stupid. For example, TextMate has a "soft tabs" mode that inserts spaces, but the UI works exactly as if tabs are in use. The same convenience when editing, without the dagger-eyed looks from your collaborators.
Ironically, given the state of copyright legislation, it seems that a good compromise position would be to ditch the Google Book Settlement (reverting control to authors) and slash the duration of copyright to a tiny fraction of its current amount (opening a vast amount of works into the public domain -- and into electronic archives). Google and other companies could then negotiate terms with authors for rights to enter newer works into their archives as well. Offhand, I'd target between five to twenty years or so, possibly varying in that range depending on renewals, etc.
Now that graphics are largely stagnant in between console generations
I'm afraid that you've lost me. XBox to XBox 360, PS2 to PS3, both represent substantial leaps in graphics performance. In the XBox/PS2 generation, game teams clearly had to fight to allocate polygon budgets well, and it was quite visible in the end result. That's not so much the case in current generation consoles. It's also telling that transitions between in-game scenes and pre-rendered content aren't nearly as jarringly obvious as they used to be. And let's not forget the higher resolutions that current consoles are expected to seamlessly tackle.
Console makers won't be interested in stopping this trend until cost or engineering concerns block them, or until customers stop caring. I expect the latter to happen only around the time uncanney-valley-crossed photorealistic scenes can be simulated and rendered in realtime.
nor would the cost of the pins to connect to the outside.
Are you kidding? The pin driver pads take up more die real-estate than anything else (and they suck up huge amounts of power as well). Even on now-ancient early 80's ICs, the pads were gargantuan compared to any other logic. E.g. a logic module vs. a pad was a huge difference... like looking at a satellite map of a football field (pad) with a car parked beside it (logic module). These days, that's only gotten orders of magnitude worse as pin drivers haven't shrunk much at all when compared to current logic process sizes.
There's a reason that there's a fair bit of active research towards integrating optical off chip communication directly into current silicon processes. The hope is that such approaches will represent a big improvement in chip die size, power dissipation, and available bandwidth -- all just from removing the pad drivers and pins from the equation.
Blio is not a Kindle and that's the point. It's not tied to particular hardware, and as such is intended to work on a wide variety of platforms, including slate devices. And unlike Kindle and many other ebook formats, Blio has color, support for proper typography and layout, and more. Personally, I see the Kindle and many current competitors as devices that are like the pre-original-iPod MP3 players. Player UI often *sucked* for navigating even a tiny library of music, but hey, they were still kinda neat, right?
Whether Blio is "it" or not is irrelevant -- Kurzweil's idea is spot on, in that the current generation devices restrict the use of much of what we've learned over the centuries about how to present text and information.
Whups, forgot some key notes for would-be OS X extension users. You'll need a dev channel build and must invoke Chrome from the command line with flags to enable various behavior: --enable-extensions is what's needed here. See this Mac OS X Hints article for other flags and a handy hack to make Chrome/Chromium start with the desired flags enabled via its app icon.
It's worth noting that RSS support is an extension for Chrome, written by Google. It presents the usual RSS location bar icon, and is configurable:
The extension comes with 4 feed readers predefined (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) but also allows you to add any web-based feed reader of your choice to the list.
No RSS-as-bookmark folders support, but I don't miss that as I vastly prefer a dedicated (desktop or webapp) RSS reader.
Works great for me on Linux. OS X users will need to grab a dev channel build for extensions support; the usual disclaimers about unreleased code apply. The recent Mac Chrome release doesn't have extensions turned on yet.
Thanks for bringing up this classic. I also really loved Bushido Blade. The open-field tactics, the gorgeous scenery in and around the engagement areas (ah, slashing at your opponent, but instead cutting down tall, rustling bamboo...), plus the unique hit/dead gameplay were fantastic. Bushido Blade II was my favorite; it seemed slightly more polished than the original -- essentially more of the same with lessons learned from the first game by the design and development team.
I keep wishing for a re-release for newer platforms. Bushido Blade on the Wii with the Motion Plus controller would be to die for.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Its not like a heart which you have to keep alive between the donor and recipient.
More to the point, it's not something which needs a stringent donor match as do current transplant techniques. With the relatively vast donor pool, there's no need to develop a synthetic collagen scaffold just to be able to apply this stem cell technique broadly.
Yes, but in the US this concept has spiraled out of control. It's gone beyond mere protection for the wronged into a massive chilling effect on society. But Philip K. Howard says it far better than I: Four ways to fix a broken legal system.
Lovely, another case of life imitates sci-fi. This development reminds me a bit of the superconductors in some of Larry Niven's books (esp. the Ringworld series). In addition to being an electrical superconductor this material was also a thermal superconductor -- and was used as a sort of sci-fi super heatsink on a few occasions. It was mostly represented by ultra-strong threads, and occasionally a woven cloth IIRC.
Start-up time isn't very significant - I generally leave browsers running all the time.
Motion seconded. I find this metric pointless in isolation, since the actual browser startup time is dwarfed by reloading persisted tabs across sessions. User-facing startup time for me is effectively (app startup + time to load up needed tab(s)). Tab persistence is an absolutely must-have feature as far as I'm concerned -- the browser can crash, I can close the browser, or even shutdown the machine without "losing my place".
And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces? Will they pay Nokia for developing cell phones and smart phones for years? Hypocrisy is the one of the most despicable traits imaginable. This lawsuit has that coming out of it's ears.
Hypocrisy? In standard patent position saber-rattling? WTF? Either {Xerox, Nokia, etc.} have active patents that cover tech in use by Apple and successfully enforces same... or they don't. If they don't have active and enforceable patents, then those technologies are available for anyone to implement themselves. That's how patents work. The problems with patents have been well trod on these pages, but it's *stupid beyond belief* to just ignore the existing system and get legally screwed by your competitors. If we're talking up the Hierarchy of Stupidity, wishful misrepresentation of reality is *way* worse than mere hypocrisy. Not liking the system is no excuse for not understanding it, especially if you want to become an advocate of change.
Likewise, some poster above suggested that Apple should just pay Nokia its royalties. That's also stupid. Apple (or any company, really) should leverage its patent portfolio into cross-licensing deals. If potential negotiators aren't coming to the table, then standard tactics are to force the issue with suits. Everyone does their legal calculations, and for the most part folks come to the negotiating table and work things out. Trying to read some sort of morality into all of this is like trying to ascribe good and evil to a chess match in the park. Let's leave discussion of right and wrong in the system where it belongs, with the rule making process -- the legislature and those who elect them.
If someone is so incapable of using a computer without fucking it up, they don't need a "locked down appliance", they just need to be kept the hell away from computers period. It's akin to saying that "we just need self-driving cars" for incompetent drivers as opposed to just keeping them from getting behind the wheel.
You spoiled little brat. You can't even spin any fiber into thread/yarn, much less weave it into useful fabric or make clothes! You shouldn't even be allowed to wear clothes! Freeze, ya limey bastard!
There now. History shows that you're being a twit. A major early impact of the industrial revolution was that it stopped the need for virtually *everyone*, regardless of gender, age, etc. to be involved in textile production just to have clothes on their back. Spare time wasn't "spare": you were spinning fiber, male or female, old or young. In short time, those skills practically vanished from the industrialized world due to mass-produced textile products. (It's worth noting that these still are still part of daily life in many places today.)
In that vein, there's vast room for improvement in computer usability, security, and maintainability. For example, we've been stuck in the WIMP era (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers), as if that's the be-all, end-all of computer interfaces. Time for some fresh ideas there -- put into production, not just as academic exercises. Eventually many of the "computing skills" we understand now will be as obsolete as floppy disks. It doesn't even matter whether iPad (or ChromeOS, or ...) is "it" or not, just that the ice has been broken. Heed the wake-up call: one-size-fits-all computing is dead. Enter cellphones, Kindles, iPads, PSPs, DSs, and many tools we haven't even thought of yet.
some companies don't want to pay the fees necessary for a small battalion of lawyers to confirm its use on a server platform or within a product.
It doesn't take a "battalion of lawyers". It just takes a working relationship with qualified legal counsel, who is knowledgable in modern software copyright issues. It used to be that such folks were scarce as hen's teeth, but now you mostly just have to know enough to ask for and retain the right attorney or firm, on the terms appropriate for your size of business. Development will need to participate, but mostly this comes down to educating the team(s) to percolate up requests like: "hey, I'd like to use package X which has license Y, is that license OK?" This query either hits cache ("license Y is known to be {good,bad}"), or misses and becomes a review request to an attorney.
Computers are not fairy dust. One does not sprinkle "computers" on a problem to make the problem go away. They are simply tools that can be applied to solve a wide variety of problems -- but only work well when a real-world problem domain is understood by those attempting a solution. So much of "computers in education" have been ill-informed stabs in the dark by those who either don't understand the problem (and therefore relevant solutions) and/or who simply want to make money by selling solutions without regard to problems.
That said, computers are already transforming education because we're finally at the point where we can change the affordances of education. Consider the experience of having both good vs bad instructor/professors. As online video and remote classroom technologies improve, we're increasingly able to simply put all of the students in "the good prof's class" -- even though he or she is on the other side of the continent. You could be in the Big Lecture Hall with the bad prof, or have a world-class "+5 Insightful" instructor available via your computer. For live classes, this comes with the same Q&A opportunities as a standard classroom (more tech well-applied). For previously recorded classes, students get the benefit of review opportunities that never existed in a traditional class. Or in many cases, students can attend a live lecture with complete "recall" of the lecture material provided by increasingly good online presentation of the lecture video and notes.
What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?
By whom? For what purpose? You're implicitly invoking The Mysterious Them (the planners), but actual people and/or organizations of people need to do the footwork. Things inhibiting game developers targeting Linux include:
What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?
[sarcasm]Forecast calls for discussion turning into occasional badgering with signs of whimpering and pleading in the afternoon.[/sarcasm]
More seriously, this requires convincing the GPU makers that the investment in providing Linux drivers will have sufficient net return. Note that "sufficient" is a hurdle well beyond just breaking even. There has to be enough return to cover the opportunity costs involved for the dev effort. I.e. could those devs have been doing something other than Linux drivers that would have made the company more money? Maybe even a lot more money?
One of the aspects of why plagiarism is seen as wrong is because you're taking credit for someone else's work.
This reminds me of a policy for handling plagiarism (in CS classes, as it happens) I heard about some years back. In summary, the offense was converted to not citing your sources. I recall that the penalty was quite severe, along the lines of a major final grade penalty or perhaps disciplinary action. However, if you cited your sources, you got credit for the portion of the work you did independently. That is, for what value you added. This system changed the economics of plagiarism such that it was vastly reduced, and weasel-wording by caught students was virtually eliminated. Interestingly, students found it much less risky to simply cite one's sources (even when copying an entire assignment!) than to risk the all-or-nothing path. Some enterprising students even found ways to bring in and leverage other works to achieve interesting goals that didn't damage their grade.
This is a case where I really want to "vote against" a movie project before it hits the theaters. I'd love a well-crafted realization of the Foundation books on screen, but not a movie by a Hollywood hack producing something without any vision broader than trading CG whizbang for cash. The opportunity cost of having to wait until this mess is forgotten and the rights end up in competent hands is just too damn high: it's probably a matter of waiting until the practically-endless copyright expires. Fsckers.
There's no reason that a Foundation movie (to stay in-genre) shouldn't be at least as thought provoking as, say, Blade Runner.
Better living through non-chemistry. I'll bet this can be adapted to target clothes moths and case-making moths, the two species responsible for textile (and other) damage. The things are pernicious; very difficult to remove from a home with an infestation. Perhaps even make the zapper more effective by using it to cover the area where a pheremone trap is located (to draw adults into the kill zone).
If only Intel were willing to bet the company on it, about 10 years ago, we would all be using it today.
IMO, Intel borked the IA-64 nee EPIC architectural effort in the design stage. It's informative to compare the IA-64 architectural approach to that of the TI C67xx series of VLIW DSPs chips. There's certainly some apples and oranges in there, but the TI VLIW chips showed the possibility of a parallel ISA that is simple, effective, and targetable (i.e. both humans and compilers could generate good code) -- and at a similar point in time to Intel's own efforts. Cell would be another interesting point of comparison with the above two architectures.
At the time, IA-64's design implied "we're Intel, we can make things as complicated as we want!"... and this hubris persisted without regard to implementation concerns such as design time due to said complexity (which effectively killed Itanium) and the enormous die-area suck for the massive hardware controller. It's also unclear to me whether proper concern was given to good compiler-chip synergies in this architecture, which are generally key to good performance. Frankly, I think we're *much* better off with the current multi-core path than we ever would have been with the conceptually bloated mess that was the Itanic.
That's where I stopped reading. I'm on a no-buzzword diet.
Excellent! More enjoyable and better paying work (and better co-workers) for the rest of us clued enough to realize when there's real substance behind those buzzwords. Have fun with that self ghettoizing!
It's not about having an editor or not having an editor. A good editor is a member of a team focused on producing a great creative work.
Instead, these types of fights were about the restrictions of the entrenched format -- how many panels, how formatted, how big, how often. And that's not even considering the lowest common denominator factor of a VERY bandwidth restricted medium -- two-ish pages for weekday comics, with a bit more room for the Sunday funnies. The decision to drop a comic or add a comic was a notable one for most papers; no decision would keep everyone happy.
Maybe there are web comics out there that would do well with an editor, but there are a number of great ones that seem to get along far better than their print counterparts by way of art, creativity, and storytelling.
But the iPad is unlocked out of the gate -- no contract and no provider lock-in. Whether or not AT&T gets a cut, these data plans create interesting competitive price pressure.
It behaves predictably across editors and allows easy changing of width for various programmers.
I'm amazed that you can utter this with a straight face. "behaves predictably" and "allows easy changing of width" are pretty much diametrically opposed concepts, at least if you actually share your code with any other human being. If tab-width were somehow a universally self-describing attribute in text files, then this could fly. But without it, we're left in a place where others viewing your code open the file (or heaven forbid, use cat/more/less!) and then feel fscked.
I'll also observe that a number of popular editors don't even have clean per-project (or per-file) concepts of tab-width setting and such settings are often clunky in the best of those that do.
If I'm hitting the tab key and it's inserting X spaces, and I hit the key once too many times, I have to hit delete X times instead of just once.
This is only true if your editor is being stupid. For example, TextMate has a "soft tabs" mode that inserts spaces, but the UI works exactly as if tabs are in use. The same convenience when editing, without the dagger-eyed looks from your collaborators.
Ironically, given the state of copyright legislation, it seems that a good compromise position would be to ditch the Google Book Settlement (reverting control to authors) and slash the duration of copyright to a tiny fraction of its current amount (opening a vast amount of works into the public domain -- and into electronic archives). Google and other companies could then negotiate terms with authors for rights to enter newer works into their archives as well. Offhand, I'd target between five to twenty years or so, possibly varying in that range depending on renewals, etc.
Now that graphics are largely stagnant in between console generations
I'm afraid that you've lost me. XBox to XBox 360, PS2 to PS3, both represent substantial leaps in graphics performance. In the XBox/PS2 generation, game teams clearly had to fight to allocate polygon budgets well, and it was quite visible in the end result. That's not so much the case in current generation consoles. It's also telling that transitions between in-game scenes and pre-rendered content aren't nearly as jarringly obvious as they used to be. And let's not forget the higher resolutions that current consoles are expected to seamlessly tackle.
Console makers won't be interested in stopping this trend until cost or engineering concerns block them, or until customers stop caring. I expect the latter to happen only around the time uncanney-valley-crossed photorealistic scenes can be simulated and rendered in realtime.
nor would the cost of the pins to connect to the outside.
Are you kidding? The pin driver pads take up more die real-estate than anything else (and they suck up huge amounts of power as well). Even on now-ancient early 80's ICs, the pads were gargantuan compared to any other logic. E.g. a logic module vs. a pad was a huge difference... like looking at a satellite map of a football field (pad) with a car parked beside it (logic module). These days, that's only gotten orders of magnitude worse as pin drivers haven't shrunk much at all when compared to current logic process sizes.
There's a reason that there's a fair bit of active research towards integrating optical off chip communication directly into current silicon processes. The hope is that such approaches will represent a big improvement in chip die size, power dissipation, and available bandwidth -- all just from removing the pad drivers and pins from the equation.
Blio is not a Kindle and that's the point. It's not tied to particular hardware, and as such is intended to work on a wide variety of platforms, including slate devices. And unlike Kindle and many other ebook formats, Blio has color, support for proper typography and layout, and more. Personally, I see the Kindle and many current competitors as devices that are like the pre-original-iPod MP3 players. Player UI often *sucked* for navigating even a tiny library of music, but hey, they were still kinda neat, right?
Whether Blio is "it" or not is irrelevant -- Kurzweil's idea is spot on, in that the current generation devices restrict the use of much of what we've learned over the centuries about how to present text and information.
Whups, forgot some key notes for would-be OS X extension users. You'll need a dev channel build and must invoke Chrome from the command line with flags to enable various behavior: --enable-extensions is what's needed here. See this Mac OS X Hints article for other flags and a handy hack to make Chrome/Chromium start with the desired flags enabled via its app icon.
It's worth noting that RSS support is an extension for Chrome, written by Google. It presents the usual RSS location bar icon, and is configurable:
The extension comes with 4 feed readers predefined (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) but also allows you to add any web-based feed reader of your choice to the list.
No RSS-as-bookmark folders support, but I don't miss that as I vastly prefer a dedicated (desktop or webapp) RSS reader.
Works great for me on Linux. OS X users will need to grab a dev channel build for extensions support; the usual disclaimers about unreleased code apply. The recent Mac Chrome release doesn't have extensions turned on yet.
Thanks for bringing up this classic. I also really loved Bushido Blade. The open-field tactics, the gorgeous scenery in and around the engagement areas (ah, slashing at your opponent, but instead cutting down tall, rustling bamboo...), plus the unique hit/dead gameplay were fantastic. Bushido Blade II was my favorite; it seemed slightly more polished than the original -- essentially more of the same with lessons learned from the first game by the design and development team.
I keep wishing for a re-release for newer platforms. Bushido Blade on the Wii with the Motion Plus controller would be to die for. ;-)