No worries, we have 7 years. Just look back at the past 7 years:
--My home connection speeds have tripled in the past 7 years while the prices have dropped by half.
--We were all trolling along wirelessly at 4.5 Mbit/s (~500 kbyte/sec) seven years ago because 802.11g didn't exist yet. Even now 802.11g is outdated with it's measly 23 Mbit/s and 802.11n is right around the corner, offering 3x the speeds and double the range, and WiMax looks even more promising.
--No one had gigabytes of free online storage 7 years ago. Gmail didn't even exist until 2004 and it started with 1 gig, which was enormous amounts for a free email account at the time since Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes and Yahoo offered 4 megabytes. Now you can get 25 gigabytes of online storage for free. Imagine what free online storage will be like in 7 more years? 250gb? 1 terabyte?
"Using a touch-screen as a keyboard is a terrible idea, and only good for very casual users."
I very much agree. Touch-screens will not be used as keyboards until they can provide tactile response and keys with at least 3mm of travel like modern keyboards. If they can figure that out then I could see "touch-screen" keyboards happening.
However I could imagine the mouse touchpad becoming a touchscreen.
I think laptops in 7 yrs will become more like the Mac Air and the Eee PC but with swiveling lay-flat touch-screen LCDs. The need to DVD and CD drives installed within the laptops will disappear as free online storage and faster wireless speeds replace the need to record or install from physical media.
"However, the majority of my friends are actually out of college, many of them married with children, so I feel that I have at least a little bit of perspective on this. "
flame me i don't care, but I call BS. Just because you have a friend (and on/.?? yea right!) who did it isn't the same as living it.
screw what you like to do and just make money.
"Finally, I'm sorry critical thinking was dead at your college, but that is not the case here, and does not seem to be the case at many of the colleges my friends go to."
yeah college kid our schools sucked and yours is amazing and us in the real world know nothing and college kids know-it-all. Guess it's true what they say about Gen Y's: "skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."
"Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need."
Please show me where it says this will only be use to light outside properties. I thought the point was to replace light bulbs, not streetlights. The streetlight reference and example was just to show how powerful this technology is because most people understand how bright streetlights are.
"But that's why patents do have expiration dates. "
And hers was nearly up. According to the article:
"Rothschild was originally issued a U.S. patent in 1993 based on her method of producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and laser diodes in the blue and ultraviolet end of the light spectrum."
That's 15 years ago. And according to lectlaw.com "If a U.S. Patent Application is filed by June 7, 1995, and if
the patent issues after June 7, 1978, then the patent expires the
later of 17 years from issuance"
So she only had 2 years left. So where the hell has she been for 15 years??
The thought of them arguing is much less frightening to me than the thought of them holding hands and skipping through a field of daisies together"
why? All i want is internet. I don't care what they're doing in the cornfield behind Mr. McGregor's barn as long as the internet works. Them arguing is what scares me because that affects me.
"And the best part about a SS:, is it's multiple parallel chips."
that's RAID-0 on a chip. That explains the high read rate, although 67 megabyte/second isn't amazingly fast for flash drives: A single 1gb ATP Toughdrive reads at 33 mB/second. RAID-0 two of them and you have 66 mB/sec. Sounds like that's exactly what they did.
Another benefit of flash memory over hard drives I forgot: no maximum vs minimum rates. Data can be placed anywhere and read/write at the same speeds, compared to hard drives where data stored on the outside of the platters reads and writes faster than the inner. portion.
"The average seek time for a hard disk is measured in milliseconds, but for continued transfers, they can have a much higher data throughput than a flash based device."
True, but PCs don't store data in consecutive order. Data is just placed haphazardly around, and it's up to the file allocation table to keep track of it all. So that 5 gigabyte game you're installing isn't all in one giant line of bits, it's shoved everywhere all over the drive, and it's constantly seeking to find where the rest of the files are to load the next level. That's why people periodically defragmenting their hard drives, to put the files all next to each other and save those precious milliseconds, which quickly turn into seconds when the PC's loading a ton of files into RAM.
Because of fragmentation it's rare to have 60 megabytes of data for one application all next to each other, so that's why hard drives rarely read at there top speeds, they read a couple hundred kilobytes, seek 10ms, read some more, seek, etc.
That's why people spend big $$$ to go from 7200rpm hard drives to 10k or 15k rpm SCSI drives, because just going from 8ms down to 3ms makes a very noticeable difference. So the jump from milliseconds down to nanoseconds would make a tremendous difference. RAM is measured in nanoseconds, so to have a 160gb drive only 5-10x slower than ram would be much better than the 1,000,000 times slower speed of hard drives accessing in milliseconds.
"Instead of spending $600 on a Tivo Series3 device, you can buy a cheap $200 computer, use MythTV to replicate what the Tivo would offer, put Firefox and the VideoDownloader extension on there to watch all the YouTube videos you want on your own time."
True, but would it offer all the ease a set-top box would offer? A few years ago I'd agree with you, but for $600 it does everything without any troubleshooting or incompatibility problems. Maybe if you're poor college kid and you're the only one that uses it, but if you're a family guy or if you're trying to get laid (having a PC connected to your TV reeks of uber-dorkness) then just spend the extra cash for the Tivo.
"The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod..."
why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.
Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.
"LOL, he's a general. What, he's going to get gangrene due to a splinter from his desk?"
He didn't join the air force and immediately become a general. He's been in the air force for 30+ years. I'm sure during that time he wasn't always sitting behind a desk.
I'm a bit shocked a general would answer questions. Usually they're so far up the chain-of-command they're impossible to talk to and they're considered god-like to regular grunts (imagine your favorite famous celebrity or athlete x 100). I have my doubts whether he really answered any of these questions, probably someone a little further down the totem pole answered the questions and he signed/stamped his name at the bottom. Generals don't answer questions, they have a Capt or Major do that stuff for them.
" My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly "
Makes me miss the good ol' days when you didn't need a staff of hundreds and a multi-million dollar budget to make a good game. Back then one guy who didn't know anything could sit down and within a few months crank out a fun game for a popular console. I took a semester of assembly for CS and it's not that bad, wrote a tic-tac-toe game as a final project where the computer randomly placed it's pieces (could have had it scan the board but that'd be too hard for players, as-is the PC wins most the time) so I know a tiny fraction of what the author's talking about.
"Newsgroups? The original peer-to-peer system? Ah, forget it."
I know what you mean. I tell friends use to p2p that I get files off newsgroups within minutes instead of waiting days for people to share and they look at me like the first time they heard about mp3s or divx. "How do I get on a newsgroup?!?" They ask excitedly. I use to explain it all, but now I tell them just to google it.
"the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad."
How ironic that just yesterday it was revealed that Spore and Super Monkey ball was coming to iPhones and the author was questioning if the iPhone was on par with the Sony PSP by saying: "Does this bring the iPhone up to DS and PSP levels?". And here, just a day later, the iPhone can't play Flash video while the PSP easily plays Flash.
Guess this announcement answered that question: No, the iPhone is not a Sony PSP killer. Not even equals.
"just as free viral social apps like Scrabilicious sell more Scrabble games for the licensors than kill off the free social app will. Don't kill off the goose that lays the golden eggs..."
Golden eggs? Hasbro sells 1-2 million boards a year, and that's before the "golden egg" Scrabulous existed. They don't need Scabulous.
However these brothers are still making 25k/mo on something Hasbro had to pay good money to buy. And they already make a PC version of Scrabble. This is like someone making a online version of Starcraft and then bitching when Blizzard comes after them. What sense does that make?
if you want to use someone's property you have to do the right thing: ask them to use it and pay them if they demand it. You can't just steal it and say "but I'm doing some good with it!" Life doesn't work like that.
"Yeah they're so dumb that they're... making lots of money....Seems like it's you who isn't bright."
Yeah, drug dealers make a lot of money and look where they end up? Still think they're bright?
They stole the game and put it online. Why are people defending them? They pirated the game: when people rip movies and put them online and sell them for $25,000/mo and the FBI raids their home does anyone on/. say "Hey that's not right! They were only stealing money from the creators!"
I hope Hasbro sues them for every dime they've made. You can't just rip-off popular board games and cry foul when the owners bitch. How stupid is that? Anyone want to make a online Monopoly... er, I mean "Monopolious"... and cry then Parker Brothers sues? It'd be total anarchy if Hasbro let's these guys continue. Hell if they somehow get away with this I'm making Starcraft Universe (WoW clone) and I'm gonna be a millionaire!
"Yes, mine in fact does give out free copies. Office 2007 Enterprise, SQL Standard, Visual Studio Professional and numerous others all downloadable from the campus website legally."
Really? None of the colleges and universities around here offer that service. There's "student editions" available in the bookstore but that's it.
"hey argue that by forcing manufacturers, who already have thin margins to cut their margins even further by creating cheaper and cheaper commodity hardware, it will limit the likelihood of manufacturers investing in high-margin, high-value, cutting edge hardware- and will therefore limit the development of said hardware."
You can go to Walmart and buy a complete PC system with LCD for $400, even less online. Has that stopped manufactures from making faster processors and video cards? Of course not, and neither will cheap laptops.
Saying the Eee PC threatens laptop manufactures is like saying motorcycles threaten SUV sales. If they really want to be competitive, Sony should make a Eee PC clone. I'm sure there's money to be made selling a 7" LCD, 2gb storage and 900mhz processor for $300.
Sony's argument is BS. I would think they'd be more worried about the full-sized $500 laptops competing with their $1,500 notebooks considering they're much closer in specs.
"The amazing thing is that many students are learning occupations that are dependent on IP and yet continue to ignore it. I wonder who they expect to provide them a paycheck once they become producers? Or would they rather go the inefficient route of millions of one-offs?"
Exactly how are they suppose to learn to use all this software without being able to actually use it? Because students already have enough expenses with the cost of books and tuition raising much faster than inflation, and it's been doing this for at least 8 years now (article dated Oct 2000). So where are they suppose to get the extra couple grand it costs to pay for all the software that industries expect them to know? Think schools are handing out free copies of Office or Visual C++? I wouldn't know a tenth of what I know if it wasn't for downloading software.
"This sort-of reminds me of an episode of Star Trek DS9 where a bunch of really intelligent humans calculated that the end of the universe was a billion years away. Frantic, they tried to save the universe. But in the end, they finally thought it to not be worth it since it was such a long way off."
Agreed. Besides, man went from first flight to the moon within 70 years, can you imagine where we'll be in just 1,000 years, much less 7.6 billion years??
"I wonder if slashdot will even be round in even 25 years time. Perhaps the internet will be replaced in much the same way that BBSs were. Please feel free to point out why this wouldn't happen..."
/. will be around in 25 yrs if I have anything to do about it! Might not be in the form we all recognize it as today, but it will be around. Same with many of the popular BBSs, they've gone online.
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, we have 7 years. Just look back at the past 7 years:
--My home connection speeds have tripled in the past 7 years while the prices have dropped by half.
--We were all trolling along wirelessly at 4.5 Mbit/s (~500 kbyte/sec) seven years ago because 802.11g didn't exist yet. Even now 802.11g is outdated with it's measly 23 Mbit/s and 802.11n is right around the corner, offering 3x the speeds and double the range, and WiMax looks even more promising.
--No one had gigabytes of free online storage 7 years ago. Gmail didn't even exist until 2004 and it started with 1 gig, which was enormous amounts for a free email account at the time since Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes and Yahoo offered 4 megabytes. Now you can get 25 gigabytes of online storage for free. Imagine what free online storage will be like in 7 more years? 250gb? 1 terabyte?
--Video downloads didn't exist in 2001, but now movie downloads are everywhere. Imagine how much further we'll go in 7 years: We'll probably have a Microsoft Movie Channel built right into Windows 7 to compete with iTunes.
"Using a touch-screen as a keyboard is a terrible idea, and only good for very casual users."
I very much agree. Touch-screens will not be used as keyboards until they can provide tactile response and keys with at least 3mm of travel like modern keyboards. If they can figure that out then I could see "touch-screen" keyboards happening.
However I could imagine the mouse touchpad becoming a touchscreen.
I think laptops in 7 yrs will become more like the Mac Air and the Eee PC but with swiveling lay-flat touch-screen LCDs. The need to DVD and CD drives installed within the laptops will disappear as free online storage and faster wireless speeds replace the need to record or install from physical media.
"I am just trying to ponder what *I* would need 1 Tb of disk space for, when my 40Gb drive is barely used."
pOrn of course! After all the internet is for porn
"However, the majority of my friends are actually out of college, many of them married with children, so I feel that I have at least a little bit of perspective on this. "
/.?? yea right!) who did it isn't the same as living it.
flame me i don't care, but I call BS. Just because you have a friend (and on
screw what you like to do and just make money.
"Finally, I'm sorry critical thinking was dead at your college, but that is not the case here, and does not seem to be the case at many of the colleges my friends go to."
yeah college kid our schools sucked and yours is amazing and us in the real world know nothing and college kids know-it-all. Guess it's true what they say about Gen Y's: "skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."
"Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need."
Please show me where it says this will only be use to light outside properties. I thought the point was to replace light bulbs, not streetlights. The streetlight reference and example was just to show how powerful this technology is because most people understand how bright streetlights are.
"But that's why patents do have expiration dates. "
And hers was nearly up. According to the article: "Rothschild was originally issued a U.S. patent in 1993 based on her method of producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and laser diodes in the blue and ultraviolet end of the light spectrum."
That's 15 years ago. And according to lectlaw.com
"If a U.S. Patent Application is filed by June 7, 1995, and if the patent issues after June 7, 1978, then the patent expires the later of 17 years from issuance"
So she only had 2 years left. So where the hell has she been for 15 years??
The thought of them arguing is much less frightening to me than the thought of them holding hands and skipping through a field of daisies together"
why? All i want is internet. I don't care what they're doing in the cornfield behind Mr. McGregor's barn as long as the internet works. Them arguing is what scares me because that affects me.
"Millions of intelligent people took it as a reminder that GoDaddy should be avoided at all costs."
I'm shocked anyone uses GoDaddy after the last time they took down a website because Myspace asked them to. Then GoDaddy says they gave the admin a hour notice and the admin revealed evidence giving him only one minute notice. GoDaddy's response? "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous". Tank-ya masta! Tank-ya masta GoDaddy for the 1 minute notice!
"And the best part about a SS:, is it's multiple parallel chips."
that's RAID-0 on a chip. That explains the high read rate, although 67 megabyte/second isn't amazingly fast for flash drives: A single 1gb ATP Toughdrive reads at 33 mB/second. RAID-0 two of them and you have 66 mB/sec. Sounds like that's exactly what they did.
Another benefit of flash memory over hard drives I forgot: no maximum vs minimum rates. Data can be placed anywhere and read/write at the same speeds, compared to hard drives where data stored on the outside of the platters reads and writes faster than the inner. portion.
"but for continued transfers, they can have a much higher data throughput than a flash based device. "
And that's why I said RAID-0 array, so the transfer speeds could be increased by spreading the files amongst all the flash drives.
"The average seek time for a hard disk is measured in milliseconds, but for continued transfers, they can have a much higher data throughput than a flash based device."
True, but PCs don't store data in consecutive order. Data is just placed haphazardly around, and it's up to the file allocation table to keep track of it all. So that 5 gigabyte game you're installing isn't all in one giant line of bits, it's shoved everywhere all over the drive, and it's constantly seeking to find where the rest of the files are to load the next level. That's why people periodically defragmenting their hard drives, to put the files all next to each other and save those precious milliseconds, which quickly turn into seconds when the PC's loading a ton of files into RAM.
Because of fragmentation it's rare to have 60 megabytes of data for one application all next to each other, so that's why hard drives rarely read at there top speeds, they read a couple hundred kilobytes, seek 10ms, read some more, seek, etc.
That's why people spend big $$$ to go from 7200rpm hard drives to 10k or 15k rpm SCSI drives, because just going from 8ms down to 3ms makes a very noticeable difference. So the jump from milliseconds down to nanoseconds would make a tremendous difference. RAM is measured in nanoseconds, so to have a 160gb drive only 5-10x slower than ram would be much better than the 1,000,000 times slower speed of hard drives accessing in milliseconds.
"Instead of spending $600 on a Tivo Series3 device, you can buy a cheap $200 computer, use MythTV to replicate what the Tivo would offer, put Firefox and the VideoDownloader extension on there to watch all the YouTube videos you want on your own time."
True, but would it offer all the ease a set-top box would offer? A few years ago I'd agree with you, but for $600 it does everything without any troubleshooting or incompatibility problems. Maybe if you're poor college kid and you're the only one that uses it, but if you're a family guy or if you're trying to get laid (having a PC connected to your TV reeks of uber-dorkness) then just spend the extra cash for the Tivo.
FYI you can always watch Youtube on a Nintendo Wii and skip the new Tivo entirely.
"The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod..."
why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.
Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.
i for one welcome our new flash memory overlords!
"LOL, he's a general. What, he's going to get gangrene due to a splinter from his desk?"
He didn't join the air force and immediately become a general. He's been in the air force for 30+ years. I'm sure during that time he wasn't always sitting behind a desk.
I'm a bit shocked a general would answer questions. Usually they're so far up the chain-of-command they're impossible to talk to and they're considered god-like to regular grunts (imagine your favorite famous celebrity or athlete x 100). I have my doubts whether he really answered any of these questions, probably someone a little further down the totem pole answered the questions and he signed/stamped his name at the bottom. Generals don't answer questions, they have a Capt or Major do that stuff for them.
" My first officemate didn't know how to set up his computer. He didn't know anything, it appeared. He'd been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly "
Makes me miss the good ol' days when you didn't need a staff of hundreds and a multi-million dollar budget to make a good game. Back then one guy who didn't know anything could sit down and within a few months crank out a fun game for a popular console. I took a semester of assembly for CS and it's not that bad, wrote a tic-tac-toe game as a final project where the computer randomly placed it's pieces (could have had it scan the board but that'd be too hard for players, as-is the PC wins most the time) so I know a tiny fraction of what the author's talking about.
"Newsgroups? The original peer-to-peer system? Ah, forget it."
I know what you mean. I tell friends use to p2p that I get files off newsgroups within minutes instead of waiting days for people to share and they look at me like the first time they heard about mp3s or divx. "How do I get on a newsgroup?!?" They ask excitedly. I use to explain it all, but now I tell them just to google it.
"the iPhone isn't powerful enough to run flash properly. Too bad."
How ironic that just yesterday it was revealed that Spore and Super Monkey ball was coming to iPhones and the author was questioning if the iPhone was on par with the Sony PSP by saying: "Does this bring the iPhone up to DS and PSP levels?". And here, just a day later, the iPhone can't play Flash video while the PSP easily plays Flash.
Guess this announcement answered that question: No, the iPhone is not a Sony PSP killer. Not even equals.
"just as free viral social apps like Scrabilicious sell more Scrabble games for the licensors than kill off the free social app will. Don't kill off the goose that lays the golden eggs ..."
Golden eggs? Hasbro sells 1-2 million boards a year, and that's before the "golden egg" Scrabulous existed. They don't need Scabulous.
However these brothers are still making 25k/mo on something Hasbro had to pay good money to buy. And they already make a PC version of Scrabble. This is like someone making a online version of Starcraft and then bitching when Blizzard comes after them. What sense does that make?
if you want to use someone's property you have to do the right thing: ask them to use it and pay them if they demand it. You can't just steal it and say "but I'm doing some good with it!" Life doesn't work like that.
"Yeah they're so dumb that they're... making lots of money....Seems like it's you who isn't bright."
/. say "Hey that's not right! They were only stealing money from the creators!"
Yeah, drug dealers make a lot of money and look where they end up? Still think they're bright?
They stole the game and put it online. Why are people defending them? They pirated the game: when people rip movies and put them online and sell them for $25,000/mo and the FBI raids their home does anyone on
I hope Hasbro sues them for every dime they've made. You can't just rip-off popular board games and cry foul when the owners bitch. How stupid is that? Anyone want to make a online Monopoly... er, I mean "Monopolious"... and cry then Parker Brothers sues? It'd be total anarchy if Hasbro let's these guys continue. Hell if they somehow get away with this I'm making Starcraft Universe (WoW clone) and I'm gonna be a millionaire!
"I bet every voice will be Seth MacFarlane like American Dad.."
Of course! That's called job security. Can't outsource voice-overs to India.
"Yes, mine in fact does give out free copies. Office 2007 Enterprise, SQL Standard, Visual Studio Professional and numerous others all downloadable from the campus website legally."
Really? None of the colleges and universities around here offer that service. There's "student editions" available in the bookstore but that's it.
"hey argue that by forcing manufacturers, who already have thin margins to cut their margins even further by creating cheaper and cheaper commodity hardware, it will limit the likelihood of manufacturers investing in high-margin, high-value, cutting edge hardware- and will therefore limit the development of said hardware."
You can go to Walmart and buy a complete PC system with LCD for $400, even less online. Has that stopped manufactures from making faster processors and video cards? Of course not, and neither will cheap laptops.
The Eee PC is no threat to Sony or any other major manufacture. It has no dvd-rw drive, no hard drive, and the cheapest $300 model only has 2gb of storage. 2gb! Most laptops have more ram than this has total storage! It costs $500 to get a Eee with only 8gb, and for that price you could buy a full-sized 1.86ghz Inspiron 1525 from Dell or Walmart has several laptops betweeen $400 and $500
Saying the Eee PC threatens laptop manufactures is like saying motorcycles threaten SUV sales. If they really want to be competitive, Sony should make a Eee PC clone. I'm sure there's money to be made selling a 7" LCD, 2gb storage and 900mhz processor for $300.
Sony's argument is BS. I would think they'd be more worried about the full-sized $500 laptops competing with their $1,500 notebooks considering they're much closer in specs.
"The amazing thing is that many students are learning occupations that are dependent on IP and yet continue to ignore it. I wonder who they expect to provide them a paycheck once they become producers? Or would they rather go the inefficient route of millions of one-offs?"
Exactly how are they suppose to learn to use all this software without being able to actually use it? Because students already have enough expenses with the cost of books and tuition raising much faster than inflation, and it's been doing this for at least 8 years now (article dated Oct 2000). So where are they suppose to get the extra couple grand it costs to pay for all the software that industries expect them to know? Think schools are handing out free copies of Office or Visual C++? I wouldn't know a tenth of what I know if it wasn't for downloading software.
"This sort-of reminds me of an episode of Star Trek DS9 where a bunch of really intelligent humans calculated that the end of the universe was a billion years away. Frantic, they tried to save the universe. But in the end, they finally thought it to not be worth it since it was such a long way off."
Agreed. Besides, man went from first flight to the moon within 70 years, can you imagine where we'll be in just 1,000 years, much less 7.6 billion years??
"I wonder if slashdot will even be round in even 25 years time. Perhaps the internet will be replaced in much the same way that BBSs were. Please feel free to point out why this wouldn't happen..."
/. will be around in 25 yrs if I have anything to do about it! Might not be in the form we all recognize it as today, but it will be around. Same with many of the popular BBSs, they've gone online.