Then again, 512k should be enough memory for anyone, and there will never be a market for more than five computers in the US.
What's with this obsession about mispredictions of the past? 500 gig hard-drives go for $450 and my family owns at least 5 personal computers (Wintel, Lintel, and Mac).
Don't underestimate the future. If you do, hindsight will catch up to you. It's your job then to keep it. Last time I checked IBM and Microsoft are doing quite well.
Would the U.S. Government then try and block non.XXX porn sites?
You can pry porn FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times
on
Unusual Open Source
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And the amazing thing is that, if you say businesses should be regulated, they're very likely to yell, "NO! The market must be FREE! The market has WISDOM!"
What are you smoking? Companies stopped saying that in the late 80s! Now it is:
"Please regulate the market (ie. give us tax money) so we can continue to support the economy (and make bucketloads of money) and give jobs to natives (which we will offshore later)."
I was speaking more from a more-storage-than-I-know-what-to-do-with perspective
Oh, don't worry. There is never enough storage(TM). Movie encoding quality will increase, games will get more immersive (maybe movies too), more detail, more of this, more of that. If transmission speeds increase quality will go up, if quality goes up transmittion speeds will have to increase. Mix in new technologies at any point and the more-storage-than-I-know-what-to-do-with-dept. won't close anytime soon;)
Seagate recently released a 500GB hard-drive. It costs $431.99CAD. 2 of them makes 1 TB. 2000 makes 1 PB. (Yes, that's overly simplified because it doesn't take into account interconnection cost, cooling, hydro, &c.)
2000 x 431.99 = $863,980CAD
I don't think that that's a lot of money for a petabyte raid. Hell, you might even get a 20% discount. Now think back about 20 years. That sum of money could have bought you 1 GB - that is an order of magnitude less in hard drive space. But here is the kicker: Approx. 20 years down the road you will get at least two magnitudes more for the same amount of money (wo/ inflation). Why? Because approx. 30 years ago, that sum of money bought you 1 MB of space.
Principally, ebooks are a good idea. They ought to take up less space, weigh a lot less than their paper-based counterparts, and be interactive. Unfortunately, most ebook reading environments (for lack of a better phrase) are either:
too expensive (price)
too bulky (form factor)
too heavy (weight)
too locked down (Digital Restriction Management)
lack certain functionality that could improve the reading experience
The perfect ebook reader would be something like a hybrid of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson's book Diamond Age and Nintendo's GameBoy SP.
An ebook reader should have:
internal storage capacity to hold ebooks
an expansion slot (like the GameBoy) to upload new ebooks and play otherwise interactive (inter-ractive?;)) media
A screen optimized for reading (flickerfree, highcontrast)
Long battery time
Reasonably cheap
Light in weight
Wireless (802.11 and/or GPRM) connection
Reconfigurable software
No DRM
That's just some of the things I would like in an ebook reader.
What is the technical difference between a line-by-line compile-on-the-fly and interpretation?
That you don't have to decide over and over again what you're are actually interpreting?
The interpreter has to read every token and decide: - what is that? - what does it do? - applicable? - eval and apply
The compiler on the other hand: - reads the token - decides what it does - outputs the result so that environment doesn't have to do all the above steps over and over again
I actually have done some of this even in Visual Basic
No, you haven't done Lisp macros in VB;). Macros are a code-generation facility. You can call this macro anywhere, anytime, even at "run-time". But macros have the full power of the language - you can write whole programs as macros which generate code that then can be compiled on-the-fly.
Paul Graham wrote a book in 1993 entitled "On Lisp". You can get it for free now from his website. He can show in much better detail than I could the power of Lisp.
Here in America it is almost impossible to open a business today (I know, I've succeeded and I've failed), mostly due to government at every level. There is so much red tape and so many regulations that there is a constantly declining desire by entrepreneurs to even take the risk.
Adam, you absolutely need to visit Germany. You wouldn't believe your eyes and ears about how much red tape there is. America's red tape is nothing compared to that.
Lisp and Prolog are both interpreted languages- as is Scheme.
Halfways there, chief. Nowadays (Common) Lisp is compiled to either bytecode or directly to native assembly. It's quite amazing to compile new functions on-the-fly. And it's fast, too. Check it out!
only the military uses Smalltalk
Isn't the military using Spark (a subset of Ada)?
that was the first time I was exposed to self-modifying code.
Try teaching 12- and 15-year-olds why they need an "account" on "their" computer and they need a "password" to protect their account from "bad things."
By the way, it's way too much work to change the current user. Buy them a used iMac for $100, upgrade the RAM for another $20, and let them not worry about that stuff.
Did that to my mom and little sister. They're as happy as they ever could be.
But a Ford already was as fast as a horse'n'buggy 100 years ago!
Surely no one needs the added benefits of airbags, driver impact cell, crumple zone, bumpers, fuel efficiency, hood, roof, catalytic converter, and so on, because you can get to school with a horse, too!
Why the fuck do you care what someone drives to school?
Do you feel he doesn't deserve that Porsche?
We have people at our school who drive up in Hummers. I think it's wasteful, but if they can afford it: I say let them blow their (or their parent's) savings on that.
It just isn't my business to tell other people what to drive.
P.S. Last time I checked you could install a whole bunch of non-Apple approved software like *BSD, GNU/Linux, and so on.
The computer and computing industry isn't standing still. Processor and signal transmission speeds increase exponentially. There will be quite enough bandwidth and processing power for everybody.
Productivity is expected to rise on a regular basis (heck, we measure the growth of our economy this way)
What are you smoking?
We measure the growth of our economy in `wealth produced'. That's a whole lotta' different from `productivity increase'. A machine's productivity can rise from 95% to 100% productivity, but if the machine is unable to produce anything useful then that's not considered economical growth.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't underestimate the future. If you do, hindsight will catch up to you. It's your job then to keep it. Last time I checked IBM and Microsoft are doing quite well.
"Please regulate the market (ie. give us tax money) so we can continue to support the economy (and make bucketloads of money) and give jobs to natives (which we will offshore later)."
"PLEASE REWIND THIS TAPE".
So, I challenge you to say that I don't have to rewind a DVDs!
would be designed by someone who knows what she is doing.
(The link is safe to click. T'was the first hit at google.)
2000 x 431.99 = $863,980CAD
I don't think that that's a lot of money for a petabyte raid. Hell, you might even get a 20% discount. Now think back about 20 years. That sum of money could have bought you 1 GB - that is an order of magnitude less in hard drive space. But here is the kicker:
Approx. 20 years down the road you will get at least two magnitudes more for the same amount of money (wo/ inflation). Why? Because approx. 30 years ago, that sum of money bought you 1 MB of space.
Ray Kurweil calls it the "Law of Accelerating Returns". 20 years down the road I will call it my petaporn array . Or maybe better not.
The perfect ebook reader would be something like a hybrid of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson's book Diamond Age and Nintendo's GameBoy SP.
An ebook reader should have:
That's just some of the things I would like in an ebook reader.
Is Appple the company that sells the P-P-P-Powerbook?
That you don't have to decide over and over again what you're are actually interpreting?
The interpreter has to read every token and decide:
- what is that?
- what does it do?
- applicable?
- eval and apply
The compiler on the other hand:
- reads the token
- decides what it does
- outputs the result so that environment doesn't have to do all the above steps over and over again
No, you haven't done Lisp macros in VB
Paul Graham wrote a book in 1993 entitled "On Lisp". You can get it for free now from his website. He can show in much better detail than I could the power of Lisp.
</preach>
Isn't the military using Spark (a subset of Ada)?
Wait till you see code writing code (Lisp)
I loved how the Queen told a Sony representative that their remotes had too many buttons. I guess she is a devout Apple fanbo...gir...queen; fanqueen.
Try teaching 12- and 15-year-olds why they need an "account" on "their" computer and they need a "password" to protect their account from "bad things."
By the way, it's way too much work to change the current user. Buy them a used iMac for $100, upgrade the RAM for another $20, and let them not worry about that stuff.
Did that to my mom and little sister. They're as happy as they ever could be.
Model: eMachines 6811
Battery: 8-cell
Can't run Windows programs, sorry.
I get about 1:45h w/ all kinds of power savings enabled, no wifi, and LCD at medium brightness. And that was out of the box.
It'll last 8 minutes w/ my AMD64 laptop! This thing eats electrons like pacman eats yellow pills.
War on Communism ...
War on Drugs
War on Terrorism
War on Competition
War on Freedom
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
But a Ford already was as fast as a horse'n'buggy 100 years ago!
Surely no one needs the added benefits of airbags, driver impact cell, crumple zone, bumpers, fuel efficiency, hood, roof, catalytic converter, and so on, because you can get to school with a horse, too!
Why the fuck do you care what someone drives to school?
Do you feel he doesn't deserve that Porsche?
We have people at our school who drive up in Hummers. I think it's wasteful, but if they can afford it: I say let them blow their (or their parent's) savings on that.
It just isn't my business to tell other people what to drive.
P.S. Last time I checked you could install a whole bunch of non-Apple approved software like *BSD, GNU/Linux, and so on.
(Relax, it's funny.)
*dons flame-retardant suit*
The Republican Party?
I wouldn't worry about that.
The computer and computing industry isn't standing still. Processor and signal transmission speeds increase exponentially. There will be quite enough bandwidth and processing power for everybody.
We measure the growth of our economy in `wealth produced'. That's a whole lotta' different from `productivity increase'. A machine's productivity can rise from 95% to 100% productivity, but if the machine is unable to produce anything useful then that's not considered economical growth.