You forget to mention the Apple Newton. There are people STILL using their Newtons today. It had handwriting recognition years ahead of anything comparable, and communication capabilities. When Steve Jobs went to Next, Mr Sculley(sic) (another corporate droid - in the theme of your post) shut it down.
Over the years Newton enthusiasts have asked the company many times to release the code so they could port their beloved operating system to newer hardware as their Newtons died of old age. Apple always refused. I can only speculate, but I think this new device may leverage the experience of the Newton - if not the code - to resurrect the table PC concept.
As I point out at length in my post above, ironically they would make more money if they did cater to a wider audience. Of course, that would require 2 things:
1. Long Term Thought.
2. Abandoning unmaintainable hard coded monolithic structured program cores that spin on tweaked out low level directX hardware APIs...
Unfortunately everyone wants to be a rock star - so everyone is more concerned about the size of their bank account without consideration for the size it would be if they made titles that endured and morphed quickly with the widest possible audience..."But it's fast...and I make a lot of money from it...", they respond.
I read your post and it occurred to me that it illustrates perfectly a key problem with software development today: short sightedness.
In an age of fast multiprocessing, it only makes sense to do everything you can to create abstraction layers that will ensure:
1. My software will have the widest possible audience regardless of platform. $$$
2. I will be able to extend the application, or create a new one with minimal effort by reusing modules I've already created to do hard things well/fast. $$$ (in form of turn-around time/effort)
3. If a vendor decides to break something in their firmware/hardware - I only have to fix one module that drives the given hardware - *NOT* the application itself. $$$ (ditto)
Flexibility, resiliency, more cash in your pocket...I don't see a down side to taking this approach. On modern gaming rigs in particular, there is no reason NOT to use OpenGL - for all it's perceived limitations compared to a tweaked out directX X86 app.
As a gamer myself, I look at it from another angle: I have Linux, Mac machines as well as a high-end Windows game rig - to host games (I like to create and share my own maps/scenarios in some games) cost efficiently I prefer to use the Linux server, and play on my Windows box....using and tweaking WINE in order to run the game (I'm not made of money and can't cost-justify a full compliment of windows servers - which also would waste resources since I am a *nix developer too). Getting WINE to work with some of the niche games I play is a royal pain. If the developers of said games took my advice, I would be running their games natively under linux with minimal headaches.
Flexibility and choice is good for the widest audience. Vendor lock-in is bad - and only serves a few types of people (the corporation$$$ and simple gamer-$$$). The funny thing is, these companies stand to make more money than they would under their lock-n strategy if they would think long term and build flexible extensible applications that benefit the largest audience. Lucky for me most of the titles I currently enjoy have taken this approach; I will continue to gravitate to those that do, and deny $$$ to those that won't.
At some point that aggregated traffic will need to traverse regionally from point to point...so you can't do away with the backbone or connectivity to it via the ISP. Someone will have to foot the bill for that - and by piggybacking on your neighbors instead of you paying for your piece, whoever connects directly to the ISP for the 'hop' will pay for all that bandwidth.
On the other hand, you might have a model where this mesh/grid traffic is handed off to the backbone via a proxy (cooperative) payed for by all users of the mesh/grid...kind of like telephone and energy cooperatives you find in certain (rural) areas of the country today.
Capability Based Security hinges on the operating system being inviolate. The problem is programmable computers by their very nature offer the opportunity to reprogram the whole system. This is not a bad thing, because it allows the same device to be used in various different ways (Linux, Windows, OSX etc) - diving deeper, it allows more efficient software (patches) to be added to the system by anyone with the desire to accomplish some task, or make the system run more efficiently.
With a capability based security system in place, OSs would collapse into one 'approved' version - and the general purpose nature of the computer would be lost (a game console would be the current model for such a system I would think).
What provider are you using? I've been using port 80 for years...as far as I can tell there are no ports blocked from my home network (aside from what I block in my firewall).
If the shuttle is decommissioned, will you be able to get parts when an engine pump malfunctions as part of the up-massing maneuver?
If you were going to do that -- I would say load up all the spare parts for the shuttle fleet - and then cannibalize the rest of the fleet to get additional parts - and ship that all up to the space station. Also include all the tools necessary to do the repairs in orbit.
Use the shuttle bay as storage/workshop, and permanently attach it to the station as a means of keeping the ISS in orbit indefinitely.
Meanwhile - use the ISS as the first stop for moving outside the Earth's gravity well -- to one of the Lagrange points -- and build a permanent station there.
The ISS would serve as a stepping stone to the permanent station - until technology catches up and allows economical movement of cargo from the earth to the L-point.
Formal short hand is something I've been toying with for some time now. Like touch-typing, learning short hand takes practice - but is well worth it in terms of speed and accuracy of notes taken. Using cursive or manuscript can not keep up.
What would really be cool would be a pen based computer interface that would be able to convert your shorthand to text. When that day happens, then the keyboard would have some competition (aside from real-speech recognition - but that has a whole other set of drawbacks -- like trying to take notes on a noisy bus).
But then s/he also wants to search it. That is harder.
That is not harder - that is impossible.
The reason is that in order to search the data, you first have to decrypt the data. If you decrypt the data on the server side, you just compromised your security. End of game.
Most shops don't have the desire to do this themselves...they would rather farm it out to a vendor who they can hold to the fire (via contractual obligation) when things go wrong.
This saves money -- because the Microsoft tax is avoided, and centralized management doesn't require as much resources.
This is less risky because IBM will be around a lot longer than Biff the system admin (who would have built your system by hand in your example).
Once the Bus exceeds the speed of the network, then I will worry about this. Until then, a FDDI based Beowulf cluster with attached storage, will continue to outperform any monolithic supercomputer (are there any left that are not clusters nowadays?)
Mere writers and bloggers don't bother with the unbiased truth, have no problem manufacturing or hiding information to support their spin, and have no qualms about plagiarizing entire articles.
- DaveV1.0
So by your definition -- 'writers and bloggers' are plagiarizing liars, and conversely 'journalists' are not? What universe are you living in? Is the reality distortion field that surrounds you set so high that it blocks out logic and common sense?
I'm not a professional journalist. I am a writer. I've never plagiarized anything (though I was accused once by a professor that couldn't believe I had the skill to write as well as I do - and proved him wrong), I've never lied or misrepresented facts, and never manufactured information.
Your assertion that 'mere writers' don't bother with the unbiased truth is a fallacy, and furthermore a slander to all conscientious writers everywhere.
Actually that energy would be better spent working on the OpenSim project to improve a well established grid and help solidify standards for interaction between the Second Life grid and other grids, than to waste energy on a dog that doesn't have a fraction of the capabilities already present in the open simulator.
I have a SanDisk mp3 player (it does other things too -- FM radio, recording to MP3 from built-in mic, picture viewer, mpeg viewer, etc) - anyway - I just drag and drop the MP3 files onto it. It extracts what information it can from the MP3 header (like artist, genre, etc). This must be on the fly -- because it is immediately available when I page through the music list. If connected to the internet it will also grab the album art when it can find it.
Its pretty much a no-brainer, and doesn't impact the user in the least (after downloading the files to the machine, I unplug and immediately begin using it...no waiting).
I guess my question would be, if Apple's music format has information embedded why don't they do something similar on the fly, instead of requiring a compilation process?
Correct me if I am wrong, but with the advent of digital TV, the public broadcasters won't use all of the spectrum -- hence the term 'white space'.
This is no different than CB radio spectrum - that is largely unregulated (everyone can broadcast on it).
That being said, this white space will not impact your TV reception.
Finally, this largely is an issue for rural areas -- most urban areas are wired with cable TV or satellite TV anyway. As a result, the odds of a rural person's TV reception being impacted by a whitespace device are minimal due to: a) lack of proximity to other people, and b) the fact that whitespace is seperate from digital TV space.
hmmm -- take a flute and a tuba. There are cords they can play together that neither can play alone. That is a big DUH!
Musicians have known this for ages; nothing new here...so the 'discovery' in that context is meaningless.
The fact that the good doctor was able to identify the cord is not meaningless in and of itself - and allows guitarists to relax and not go crazy trying to do something that is clearly impossible alone. Plenty of meaning there.
Things like electronics and other things that you can't spot inspect in person can be just as well sold in 2D because all you really need are the specifications of the item and whether it is what you are looking for.
Imagine, if you will, wanting to buy a computer -- a tower workstation -- and you want to examine it -- to see how easy it is to open, and work on - where are the memory modules -- are they poorly placed near the power supply, making replacement/retrofitting problematic?
Wouldn't it be an application that is tailored to the virtual world? This is also an application that you don't often (if ever) get a chance to do IRL - as you say.
Training and troubleshooting hardware is another area where this can be useful -- without having to incur the expense of a live system -- it can all be simulated in software in the VR world.
I agree you won't be able to try on clothes...but who thinks that is a valid application for VR anyway?
Virtual worlds can have their place in the business world -- but I believe that place is not with traditional brick and mortar mega-corps --- aside from portals to their support/sales OpenSims - which ties directly to real world product - *NOT* virtual product.
Virtual worlds are a much better fit for distributed and small businesses that want a global footprint, but don't have products or services that scale well in the real world. A distributed business can have workers/contractors all over the world, and provide tight integration via low cost virtualization in the form of virtual NOCs, meeting spaces, and other activities on a single platform (either a private SIM on the Linden Labs grid, or an OpenSim implementation - so everyone is using just one client standard). This allows the 'Mom-and-Pop' businesses to regain a foothold, lost in the rise of the Walmarts of the world.
Some businesses that this would be a good fit for are businesses that provide network services or software, or provide other related services (e.g. an independent record label could operate in that environment to serve indy artists without the overhead of physical offices and the need to jet all over the world).
That being said I also agree that these efforts are small potatoes - but for the people involved it might be enough to keep the lights on and keep food in the fridge. For most it is just a hobby. For multinational corporations it is important to have portals there, certainly, but it is not going to eclipse their traditional customer interactions (2D web, telephone, retail face to face) any time soon.
On the other hand, in a recession I also see the benefits of having a virtual presence - particularly if you have traditionally been tightly aligned with a retail presence - because people will have less money to travel, and thus will spend more time entertaining themselves at home - which might drive them into virtual worlds more than has been the case in the past. If you provide a good experience in that environment - you could reap the rewards, while your competitors end up in a slump. Again tho - this is really the realm of medium to small business imho.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget to mention the Apple Newton. There are people STILL using their Newtons today. It had handwriting recognition years ahead of anything comparable, and communication capabilities. When Steve Jobs went to Next, Mr Sculley(sic) (another corporate droid - in the theme of your post) shut it down.
Over the years Newton enthusiasts have asked the company many times to release the code so they could port their beloved operating system to newer hardware as their Newtons died of old age. Apple always refused. I can only speculate, but I think this new device may leverage the experience of the Newton - if not the code - to resurrect the table PC concept.
As I point out at length in my post above, ironically they would make more money if they did cater to a wider audience. Of course, that would require 2 things:
1. Long Term Thought.
2. Abandoning unmaintainable hard coded monolithic structured program cores that spin on tweaked out low level directX hardware APIs...
Unfortunately everyone wants to be a rock star - so everyone is more concerned about the size of their bank account without consideration for the size it would be if they made titles that endured and morphed quickly with the widest possible audience..."But it's fast...and I make a lot of money from it...", they respond.
Sometimes it is like speaking to a brick wall.
I read your post and it occurred to me that it illustrates perfectly a key problem with software development today: short sightedness.
In an age of fast multiprocessing, it only makes sense to do everything you can to create abstraction layers that will ensure:
1. My software will have the widest possible audience regardless of platform. $$$
2. I will be able to extend the application, or create a new one with minimal effort by reusing modules I've already created to do hard things well/fast. $$$ (in form of turn-around time/effort)
3. If a vendor decides to break something in their firmware/hardware - I only have to fix one module that drives the given hardware - *NOT* the application itself. $$$ (ditto)
Flexibility, resiliency, more cash in your pocket...I don't see a down side to taking this approach. On modern gaming rigs in particular, there is no reason NOT to use OpenGL - for all it's perceived limitations compared to a tweaked out directX X86 app.
As a gamer myself, I look at it from another angle: I have Linux, Mac machines as well as a high-end Windows game rig - to host games (I like to create and share my own maps/scenarios in some games) cost efficiently I prefer to use the Linux server, and play on my Windows box....using and tweaking WINE in order to run the game (I'm not made of money and can't cost-justify a full compliment of windows servers - which also would waste resources since I am a *nix developer too). Getting WINE to work with some of the niche games I play is a royal pain. If the developers of said games took my advice, I would be running their games natively under linux with minimal headaches.
Flexibility and choice is good for the widest audience. Vendor lock-in is bad - and only serves a few types of people (the corporation$$$ and simple gamer-$$$). The funny thing is, these companies stand to make more money than they would under their lock-n strategy if they would think long term and build flexible extensible applications that benefit the largest audience. Lucky for me most of the titles I currently enjoy have taken this approach; I will continue to gravitate to those that do, and deny $$$ to those that won't.
At some point that aggregated traffic will need to traverse regionally from point to point...so you can't do away with the backbone or connectivity to it via the ISP. Someone will have to foot the bill for that - and by piggybacking on your neighbors instead of you paying for your piece, whoever connects directly to the ISP for the 'hop' will pay for all that bandwidth.
On the other hand, you might have a model where this mesh/grid traffic is handed off to the backbone via a proxy (cooperative) payed for by all users of the mesh/grid...kind of like telephone and energy cooperatives you find in certain (rural) areas of the country today.
Capability Based Security hinges on the operating system being inviolate. The problem is programmable computers by their very nature offer the opportunity to reprogram the whole system. This is not a bad thing, because it allows the same device to be used in various different ways (Linux, Windows, OSX etc) - diving deeper, it allows more efficient software (patches) to be added to the system by anyone with the desire to accomplish some task, or make the system run more efficiently.
With a capability based security system in place, OSs would collapse into one 'approved' version - and the general purpose nature of the computer would be lost (a game console would be the current model for such a system I would think).
What provider are you using? I've been using port 80 for years...as far as I can tell there are no ports blocked from my home network (aside from what I block in my firewall).
If the shuttle is decommissioned, will you be able to get parts when an engine pump malfunctions as part of the up-massing maneuver?
If you were going to do that -- I would say load up all the spare parts for the shuttle fleet - and then cannibalize the rest of the fleet to get additional parts - and ship that all up to the space station. Also include all the tools necessary to do the repairs in orbit.
Use the shuttle bay as storage/workshop, and permanently attach it to the station as a means of keeping the ISS in orbit indefinitely.
Meanwhile - use the ISS as the first stop for moving outside the Earth's gravity well -- to one of the Lagrange points -- and build a permanent station there.
The ISS would serve as a stepping stone to the permanent station - until technology catches up and allows economical movement of cargo from the earth to the L-point.
I sense a movement in the force -- as if thousands of recording artists just fired their record label all at once....
Formal short hand is something I've been toying with for some time now. Like touch-typing, learning short hand takes practice - but is well worth it in terms of speed and accuracy of notes taken. Using cursive or manuscript can not keep up.
What would really be cool would be a pen based computer interface that would be able to convert your shorthand to text. When that day happens, then the keyboard would have some competition (aside from real-speech recognition - but that has a whole other set of drawbacks -- like trying to take notes on a noisy bus).
My own empirical studies over the years have validated the results of this study many times over.
But then s/he also wants to search it. That is harder.
That is not harder - that is impossible.
The reason is that in order to search the data, you first have to decrypt the data. If you decrypt the data on the server side, you just compromised your security. End of game.
Inconceivable!!
$$$$, and less risk --- that is how.
Most shops don't have the desire to do this themselves...they would rather farm it out to a vendor who they can hold to the fire (via contractual obligation) when things go wrong.
This saves money -- because the Microsoft tax is avoided, and centralized management doesn't require as much resources.
This is less risky because IBM will be around a lot longer than Biff the system admin (who would have built your system by hand in your example).
Once the Bus exceeds the speed of the network, then I will worry about this. Until then, a FDDI based Beowulf cluster with attached storage, will continue to outperform any monolithic supercomputer (are there any left that are not clusters nowadays?)
Mere writers and bloggers don't bother with the unbiased truth, have no problem manufacturing or hiding information to support their spin, and have no qualms about plagiarizing entire articles.
- DaveV1.0
So by your definition -- 'writers and bloggers' are plagiarizing liars, and conversely 'journalists' are not? What universe are you living in? Is the reality distortion field that surrounds you set so high that it blocks out logic and common sense?
I'm not a professional journalist. I am a writer. I've never plagiarized anything (though I was accused once by a professor that couldn't believe I had the skill to write as well as I do - and proved him wrong), I've never lied or misrepresented facts, and never manufactured information.
Your assertion that 'mere writers' don't bother with the unbiased truth is a fallacy, and furthermore a slander to all conscientious writers everywhere.
"Good day sir!"
Lets regulate the wind too while we're at it - for all the good it will do.
If they are successful 'regulating' the internet, it will no longer be an internet.
The levels of stupidity are astounding.
Actually that energy would be better spent working on the OpenSim project to improve a well established grid and help solidify standards for interaction between the Second Life grid and other grids, than to waste energy on a dog that doesn't have a fraction of the capabilities already present in the open simulator.
Could it also be they are partnering with Canonical, Novell and Redhat to produce a desktop system?
Things that make you go hmmmmm.
I have a SanDisk mp3 player (it does other things too -- FM radio, recording to MP3 from built-in mic, picture viewer, mpeg viewer, etc) - anyway - I just drag and drop the MP3 files onto it. It extracts what information it can from the MP3 header (like artist, genre, etc). This must be on the fly -- because it is immediately available when I page through the music list. If connected to the internet it will also grab the album art when it can find it.
Its pretty much a no-brainer, and doesn't impact the user in the least (after downloading the files to the machine, I unplug and immediately begin using it...no waiting).
I guess my question would be, if Apple's music format has information embedded why don't they do something similar on the fly, instead of requiring a compilation process?
Correct me if I am wrong, but with the advent of digital TV, the public broadcasters won't use all of the spectrum -- hence the term 'white space'.
This is no different than CB radio spectrum - that is largely unregulated (everyone can broadcast on it).
That being said, this white space will not impact your TV reception.
Finally, this largely is an issue for rural areas -- most urban areas are wired with cable TV or satellite TV anyway. As a result, the odds of a rural person's TV reception being impacted by a whitespace device are minimal due to: a) lack of proximity to other people, and b) the fact that whitespace is seperate from digital TV space.
I probably should have said pipe organ and sitar....
hmmm -- take a flute and a tuba. There are cords they can play together that neither can play alone. That is a big DUH!
Musicians have known this for ages; nothing new here...so the 'discovery' in that context is meaningless.
The fact that the good doctor was able to identify the cord is not meaningless in and of itself - and allows guitarists to relax and not go crazy trying to do something that is clearly impossible alone. Plenty of meaning there.
Things like electronics and other things that you can't spot inspect in person can be just as well sold in 2D because all you really need are the specifications of the item and whether it is what you are looking for.
Imagine, if you will, wanting to buy a computer -- a tower workstation -- and you want to examine it -- to see how easy it is to open, and work on - where are the memory modules -- are they poorly placed near the power supply, making replacement/retrofitting problematic?
Wouldn't it be an application that is tailored to the virtual world? This is also an application that you don't often (if ever) get a chance to do IRL - as you say.
Training and troubleshooting hardware is another area where this can be useful -- without having to incur the expense of a live system -- it can all be simulated in software in the VR world.
I agree you won't be able to try on clothes...but who thinks that is a valid application for VR anyway?
Virtual worlds can have their place in the business world -- but I believe that place is not with traditional brick and mortar mega-corps --- aside from portals to their support/sales OpenSims - which ties directly to real world product - *NOT* virtual product.
Virtual worlds are a much better fit for distributed and small businesses that want a global footprint, but don't have products or services that scale well in the real world. A distributed business can have workers/contractors all over the world, and provide tight integration via low cost virtualization in the form of virtual NOCs, meeting spaces, and other activities on a single platform (either a private SIM on the Linden Labs grid, or an OpenSim implementation - so everyone is using just one client standard). This allows the 'Mom-and-Pop' businesses to regain a foothold, lost in the rise of the Walmarts of the world.
Some businesses that this would be a good fit for are businesses that provide network services or software, or provide other related services (e.g. an independent record label could operate in that environment to serve indy artists without the overhead of physical offices and the need to jet all over the world).
That being said I also agree that these efforts are small potatoes - but for the people involved it might be enough to keep the lights on and keep food in the fridge. For most it is just a hobby. For multinational corporations it is important to have portals there, certainly, but it is not going to eclipse their traditional customer interactions (2D web, telephone, retail face to face) any time soon.
On the other hand, in a recession I also see the benefits of having a virtual presence - particularly if you have traditionally been tightly aligned with a retail presence - because people will have less money to travel, and thus will spend more time entertaining themselves at home - which might drive them into virtual worlds more than has been the case in the past. If you provide a good experience in that environment - you could reap the rewards, while your competitors end up in a slump. Again tho - this is really the realm of medium to small business imho.
...it's not like the code will fix itself.
Actually you can write self-modifying code. In fact that is how many early 'AI' and game systems worked on the tiny memory available on the early PCs.
It is funny how things come full circle..