Hundreds of millions of Chinese are buying the exact same stuff as you, only they have an economy that creates real, material wealth with which to fund their consumption.
But those Chinese workers are selling those products to Westerners who are borrowing the money back from China to fund their economies.
If the West goes bust, so does much of the Chinese economy.
The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
I have 4TB of video storage on my MythTV box because my girlfriend complains if it's deleted the CSI episode she didn't watch from six months ago.
They value ENERGY EFFICIENCY over everything. If you come out with a SSD technology that uses 20% less energy, but runs at 1/4th the capacity of our current SSDs, it will find itself in almost every laptop.
My laptop consumes around 20W for normal desktop use. The HDD is rated at something like 1.5W. Cutting 20% off that 1.5W will have a negligible impact on battery life.
Meanwhile the 750GB drive can't hold all my Steam games so I'm going to have to stick a 1TB in there soon.
Oh, and we put an SSD into the netbook because we regularly boot it up, do some stuff and shut it down again so knocking 60-70% off the boot time was a good investment.
Really, "most articles" in the 80's? Hyperbole or bullshit; you decide!
I'm pretty sure every mass-market article I read mentioning bubble memory in the 80s said that it was going to replace rotational storage in a few years.
This is a "transistors are crappy now vs vacuum tubes working great" argument.
No, it's a 'flash is running into fundamental laws of physics' argument.
I suspect another SSD technology will come along to replace it, but flash probably can't go much further unless you add a large oversupply of cells to replace those which die.
Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
Given the rapid decline in the number of write cycles at smaller process sizes, that may never happen with current flash technology.
The failed Soyuz docking attempts of the past, including a collision with Mir which caused substantial damage to the space station, would like to disagree with you.
Grabbing it with the robot arm and attaching it to the docking port has to be substantially easier than building a robust and reliable automatic docking system or docking it manually under remote control.
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
You need to look at what self publishing book writers actually make, the majority make only a few hundred dollars per book if they are lucky and the book is well written.
A survey published just today suggested the median income for a self-published writer was $500 a year and the average $10,000 (since some of the writers at the top of the list are earning six figures). The writers earning $500 a year or less are generally the ones who got nowhere with trade publishers because, well, they're not very good. The good ones were in the top 10% of the slush pile and are in the top 10% of self-published writers today.
Now for actual numbers, based on Kindle info, last year there there were around 1000 self publishers that sold over 800 books a month; and they are not the majority. Some of those can actually make a living. The majority of self publishers will be lucky if they make a few thousand a year.
800 books a month at $4.99 is not a bad income. And the vast majority of writers under the trade publishing system were lucky to make a few thousand a year, so nothing's changed there.
I suspect the eventual fate will be more like the Judge Dredd story I remember reading as a kid, where he's driving around a city on the Moon and passes the Apollo 11 lander covered in graffiti at the side of the road. Today's historic monument is tomorrow's 'what the heck is that heap of junk?'
I love what can be done with today's PC-based recording equipment, but a real studio is still a real studio and a garage is still a garage, even if the tracks ultimately end up on a Mac either way.
An acquaintance of mine has recorded music tracks for multi-million dollar movies in his garage (not Hollywood level, but not two guys and a camcorder either), so I would suggest you may be wrong.
there is no way hollywood can make money on $8 netlix subscriptions and letting them have first run movies before blu ray street date. and netflix refuses to have a tiered model
I don't know. They could stop paying 'stars' $50,000,000 for a few weeks' work on a movie.
Much of the cost of a big Hollywood movie is 'star' salaries, and those salaries are justified because they bring in more revenue than they cost. So if they're not doing that any more, just reduce those salaries to the point where you are making money.
I'm sure you'd find plenty of people eager to act in or direct a big Hollywood movie for a mere $1,000,000.
They can always go live and get paid for concerts. The days of being paid for a lifetime over a month's worth of work is going the way of the do-do.
Bingo.
The situation is similar with e-books. A few people can upload one book and make a million bucks, but the majority will make a few thousand per book, if it's well written and the writer isn't particularly unlucky. Which means they need to actually do a normal work week writing multiple books a year if they want to make a living at it.
Expectations are hideously skewed by the experiences of the last few decades, which are far from the historical norms. For most of history musicians did actually have to work for a living rather than perform once and go on vacation for a year.
I remember playing games on a Sinclair Spectrum emulator running in a PC emulator on a Sun laptop which probably had a 40MHz CPU, so a 1MHz 6502 on a 3GHz x86 should be trivial even with a ton of overheads in a game.
It may seem that the web has won, and with Ajax and regular HTML 5 that may be the case, but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another.
You could develop a standard such that it's compatible over all browsers and the server only sends the data and the browser decides how to display it.
Oh, hang on. We had one of those, it was called HTML. Then web developers started demanding more and more bells and whistles so they could display the page exactly how they wanted it to, and then they had to determine exactly what browser it was being displayed on so they could work out how it wanted to display the page and use different hacks to make it display differently.
England doesn't tax its citizens once you have lived abroad for long enough.
The UK doesn't tax its citizens from the day they leave the country to live abroad. You'll only pay tax if you're still considered a UK resident (e.g. if you work for a UK company and they send you to work abroad for a few months).
USA taxes are incredibly low compared to just about anywhere else (obviously not EVERYWHERE else, but just about).
A lot of Americans believe that for some reason. Mostly, I presume, the ones who've never lived abroad.
I don't know if it's still the case, but, for example, I've read that Switzerland used to offer a flat-rate tax to some high-income foreign residents where they'd pay something like $50k a year regardless of their income. Or they can pay 0% tax in the UK if they handle their money correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are buying the exact same stuff as you, only they have an economy that creates real, material wealth with which to fund their consumption.
But those Chinese workers are selling those products to Westerners who are borrowing the money back from China to fund their economies.
If the West goes bust, so does much of the Chinese economy.
In three years, 128GB will just about be enough to install Windows and a couple of new games.
The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
I have 4TB of video storage on my MythTV box because my girlfriend complains if it's deleted the CSI episode she didn't watch from six months ago.
Usage expands to fill the available space.
You do realize that if it wasn't for a government endeavour, there would be no space station for the dragon capsule to dock with?
Until it starts flying to Bigelow's space stations.
Rotational media is only going to stick around because it's CHEAP.
Well, duh.
And HDDs are $150 for 3,000GB.
They value ENERGY EFFICIENCY over everything. If you come out with a SSD technology that uses 20% less energy, but runs at 1/4th the capacity of our current SSDs, it will find itself in almost every laptop.
My laptop consumes around 20W for normal desktop use. The HDD is rated at something like 1.5W. Cutting 20% off that 1.5W will have a negligible impact on battery life.
Meanwhile the 750GB drive can't hold all my Steam games so I'm going to have to stick a 1TB in there soon.
Oh, and we put an SSD into the netbook because we regularly boot it up, do some stuff and shut it down again so knocking 60-70% off the boot time was a good investment.
Really, "most articles" in the 80's? Hyperbole or bullshit; you decide!
I'm pretty sure every mass-market article I read mentioning bubble memory in the 80s said that it was going to replace rotational storage in a few years.
Whatever happened to bubble memory anyway?
This is a "transistors are crappy now vs vacuum tubes working great" argument.
No, it's a 'flash is running into fundamental laws of physics' argument.
I suspect another SSD technology will come along to replace it, but flash probably can't go much further unless you add a large oversupply of cells to replace those which die.
Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
Given the rapid decline in the number of write cycles at smaller process sizes, that may never happen with current flash technology.
berthing is *harder* than docking.
The failed Soyuz docking attempts of the past, including a collision with Mir which caused substantial damage to the space station, would like to disagree with you.
Grabbing it with the robot arm and attaching it to the docking port has to be substantially easier than building a robust and reliable automatic docking system or docking it manually under remote control.
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
If I remember correctly, Sean Connery recorded the voice-over at the beginning of Highlander in his toilet.
You need to look at what self publishing book writers actually make, the majority make only a few hundred dollars per book if they are lucky and the book is well written.
A survey published just today suggested the median income for a self-published writer was $500 a year and the average $10,000 (since some of the writers at the top of the list are earning six figures). The writers earning $500 a year or less are generally the ones who got nowhere with trade publishers because, well, they're not very good. The good ones were in the top 10% of the slush pile and are in the top 10% of self-published writers today.
Now for actual numbers, based on Kindle info, last year there there were around 1000 self publishers that sold over 800 books a month; and they are not the majority. Some of those can actually make a living. The majority of self publishers will be lucky if they make a few thousand a year.
800 books a month at $4.99 is not a bad income. And the vast majority of writers under the trade publishing system were lucky to make a few thousand a year, so nothing's changed there.
I suspect the eventual fate will be more like the Judge Dredd story I remember reading as a kid, where he's driving around a city on the Moon and passes the Apollo 11 lander covered in graffiti at the side of the road. Today's historic monument is tomorrow's 'what the heck is that heap of junk?'
I love what can be done with today's PC-based recording equipment, but a real studio is still a real studio and a garage is still a garage, even if the tracks ultimately end up on a Mac either way.
An acquaintance of mine has recorded music tracks for multi-million dollar movies in his garage (not Hollywood level, but not two guys and a camcorder either), so I would suggest you may be wrong.
there is no way hollywood can make money on $8 netlix subscriptions and letting them have first run movies before blu ray street date. and netflix refuses to have a tiered model
I don't know. They could stop paying 'stars' $50,000,000 for a few weeks' work on a movie.
Much of the cost of a big Hollywood movie is 'star' salaries, and those salaries are justified because they bring in more revenue than they cost. So if they're not doing that any more, just reduce those salaries to the point where you are making money.
I'm sure you'd find plenty of people eager to act in or direct a big Hollywood movie for a mere $1,000,000.
They can always go live and get paid for concerts. The days of being paid for a lifetime over a month's worth of work is going the way of the do-do.
Bingo.
The situation is similar with e-books. A few people can upload one book and make a million bucks, but the majority will make a few thousand per book, if it's well written and the writer isn't particularly unlucky. Which means they need to actually do a normal work week writing multiple books a year if they want to make a living at it.
Expectations are hideously skewed by the experiences of the last few decades, which are far from the historical norms. For most of history musicians did actually have to work for a living rather than perform once and go on vacation for a year.
I remember playing games on a Sinclair Spectrum emulator running in a PC emulator on a Sun laptop which probably had a 40MHz CPU, so a 1MHz 6502 on a 3GHz x86 should be trivial even with a ton of overheads in a game.
It may seem that the web has won, and with Ajax and regular HTML 5 that may be the case, but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another.
You could develop a standard such that it's compatible over all browsers and the server only sends the data and the browser decides how to display it.
Oh, hang on. We had one of those, it was called HTML. Then web developers started demanding more and more bells and whistles so they could display the page exactly how they wanted it to, and then they had to determine exactly what browser it was being displayed on so they could work out how it wanted to display the page and use different hacks to make it display differently.
unfortunately, turnabout play does nothing for the customer or the nation.
It does if it convinces companies that they need to lobby against the patent system instead of for it.
Neither does the US, chillax, too much disinformation here passing for a fact
Yes it does, but there's a large exemption before you have to pay. $90,000 if I remember correctly?
England doesn't tax its citizens once you have lived abroad for long enough.
The UK doesn't tax its citizens from the day they leave the country to live abroad. You'll only pay tax if you're still considered a UK resident (e.g. if you work for a UK company and they send you to work abroad for a few months).
USA taxes are incredibly low compared to just about anywhere else (obviously not EVERYWHERE else, but just about).
A lot of Americans believe that for some reason. Mostly, I presume, the ones who've never lived abroad.
I don't know if it's still the case, but, for example, I've read that Switzerland used to offer a flat-rate tax to some high-income foreign residents where they'd pay something like $50k a year regardless of their income. Or they can pay 0% tax in the UK if they handle their money correctly.
England does too.
Uh, no it doesn't.
And, pedantically speaking, England doesn't tax anyone.