Ray Kurzweil still hasn't understood that everyone dies in the end. People have been searching for immortality since like forever. Allegedly the First Emperor of China died because he was taking an immortality "medicine" made by alchemists which contained mercury.
Then there is his singularity. Heck R&D goes in fits and starts. Sometimes there are even steps backward. Just look at aerospace. No civilian supersonic airplanes anymore. No one has gone to the Moon for decades. The US presently has no human space transportation capability (again). I still remember Intel's predictions where we were supposed to have CPUs hitting 10 GHz by now. It did not seem unreasonable at the time to a lot of people. Heck I remember having a CPU with 7 MHz clockspeed and when Intel made that prediction there were CPUs with 1 GHz in the market. Yet it didn't happen. Why? Heat.
So yes things will progressively better just not everything all the time.
Because after the 70s oil got cheaper and the USSR collapsed.In the mid 90s oil was at very low historical prices. Uranium mines around the world were closing not from being depleted but because the Russians were selling downgraded nuclear warheads refashioned as fuel rods as part of a nuclear weapons reduction treaty. Oil drilling and recovery methods improved. Presently oil prices are going up because of the embargo on Iran but I wouldn't be surprised if the prices went back down as capacity improves and alternatives are developed.
I predict the cost of energy will go down in the long run. Even the price of oil will probably go down until it stops being significant to most people. I suspect internal combustion engines will be forbidden from circulating in inner cities because of air pollution concerns and be replaced by electric vehicles. A lot of people will find out they do not need internal combustion vehicles at all. This will likely happen in the next 40 years.
It's easy for people to forget but Apple didn't always dominate the MP3 player market. This is mostly interesting for historic value since the top end of the MP3 player market has been getting overrun by smartphones for quite some time already. Their margins on MP3 players (iPod) have already been squashed to near irrelevance.
You are wrong. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is currently selling more than the iPhone 4S. Samsung manufactures more models, there are more Android cellphone manufacturers, but there is a single Android cellphone model that is beating the iOS model in units sold. You are deluding yourself as usual. The high margins simply mean Apple is price gouging the consumer in the middle of a financial crisis. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what will inevitably happen.
Choosing colors for code names has been done at least since WWII. Apple used to work on an operating system project called Pink which was a disaster. Then there are the Yellow Box and Blue Box monickers they used a couple of years ago. These quaint little details of how Apple works are besides the point however it does show Apple's paranoid tendency towards secrecy. Remember that Foxconn employee who died after losing an iPhone prototype a couple of years back?
The iPod was going nowhere. I still remember when it came with a Firewire connector and the software only ran on a Mac. It sold nearly nothing. Only after they switched to USB with their fourth design did it start to sell. There were plenty of other MP3 players in the market which sold a lot more units than the iPod back then.
It is only a matter of time until Android leads in Tablets like it is already leading in cellphones. There are Android cellphones cheap enough to out compete iPods. Heck there are people doing Android MP3 players as well. It is a bit of a shame no one tried to mass market the Android ARM based laptops. Those looked promising.
Perhaps you think consumer products are made of magic Apple pixie dust. Guess what, great components help to make a great final product. If you think Samsung does not produce innovative consumer products you are sorely mistaken. So tell where is that Apple cellphone with an OLED screen?
So in your mind it is easier to design and manufacture a phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard than a phone without keyboard. Fun. Both have a resistive touchscreen.
So the icon theme switched from high contrast B/W silhouettes in the F700 (if Samsung was Apple they would be saying Microsoft copied it in Window Phone 7!) to a color scheme and you think that is a radical change? I guess you never used a Symbian or Windows CE phone of the era with color icons. Samsung also manufactured those.
Of course if one has a 3x4 grid of icons and the other has a 4x4 grid of icons there is blatant copying! Only in the minds of Apple users of course. Ever considered the cellphone screen dimensions are not the same? Once the screen size is increased of course it makes sense to add more icons and you naturally get to the 4x4. You will notice Samsung also did that in the Samsung Tab which has an even wider screen where the icon grid width was extended to 5 columns. Of course there the Apple fanatic which did these slides suddenly didn't consider the icon grid dimensions to be important as a comparison measure anymore for the tablets. Pathetic! Both have an iconic quick access bar. Heck even Symbian phones had that except to save space (low resolution screen) they used text menus rather than icons. The text menus allowed you to place a call to a cellphone number or a contact in your contact list (sounds familiar?). You could also send an SMS (sounds familiar?).
Black gray and silver? My old Samsung LCD monitor purchased before the iPhone was announced also uses those colors in the device. As did my old SE cellphone from 2005. Is it suddenly forbidden to use those colors because Apple uses them? The Apple standard icon color scheme is suspiciously similar to the CSS 2.1 Web standard color scheme. The icons are obviously not the same. The icon background which makes icons look like rounded buttons was probably added so that people don't mistakenly click on the wrong icon with their fat fingers. Apparently they realized people don't miss the mark as easily as they thought and made them transparent. They seemed to be concerned with the users hitting the icon in the F700 so much that they even highlight the background, row, column in question. Probably the touch recognition was noisier. This all seems pretty obvious to me.
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Pah! No anthropomorphized personal assistant can match the sheer elegance and beauty of ViGOR.
Ray Kurzweil still hasn't understood that everyone dies in the end. People have been searching for immortality since like forever. Allegedly the First Emperor of China died because he was taking an immortality "medicine" made by alchemists which contained mercury.
Then there is his singularity. Heck R&D goes in fits and starts. Sometimes there are even steps backward. Just look at aerospace. No civilian supersonic airplanes anymore. No one has gone to the Moon for decades. The US presently has no human space transportation capability (again). I still remember Intel's predictions where we were supposed to have CPUs hitting 10 GHz by now. It did not seem unreasonable at the time to a lot of people. Heck I remember having a CPU with 7 MHz clockspeed and when Intel made that prediction there were CPUs with 1 GHz in the market. Yet it didn't happen. Why? Heat.
So yes things will progressively better just not everything all the time.
Great. Now pick any two of these.
Because after the 70s oil got cheaper and the USSR collapsed.In the mid 90s oil was at very low historical prices. Uranium mines around the world were closing not from being depleted but because the Russians were selling downgraded nuclear warheads refashioned as fuel rods as part of a nuclear weapons reduction treaty. Oil drilling and recovery methods improved. Presently oil prices are going up because of the embargo on Iran but I wouldn't be surprised if the prices went back down as capacity improves and alternatives are developed.
Actually SLS and James Webb space telescope ate the budget. Ooops.
I predict the cost of energy will go down in the long run. Even the price of oil will probably go down until it stops being significant to most people. I suspect internal combustion engines will be forbidden from circulating in inner cities because of air pollution concerns and be replaced by electric vehicles. A lot of people will find out they do not need internal combustion vehicles at all. This will likely happen in the next 40 years.
Motif was open sourced a long time ago already as Open Motif.
They opensourced Open Look a long time ago.
It's easy for people to forget but Apple didn't always dominate the MP3 player market. This is mostly interesting for historic value since the top end of the MP3 player market has been getting overrun by smartphones for quite some time already. Their margins on MP3 players (iPod) have already been squashed to near irrelevance.
The Diamond Rio sold more than 200 000 units and was released in 1998. The iPod was released in like 2001. As usual Apple fanatics rewrite history.
You are wrong. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is currently selling more than the iPhone 4S. Samsung manufactures more models, there are more Android cellphone manufacturers, but there is a single Android cellphone model that is beating the iOS model in units sold. You are deluding yourself as usual. The high margins simply mean Apple is price gouging the consumer in the middle of a financial crisis. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what will inevitably happen.
Choosing colors for code names has been done at least since WWII. Apple used to work on an operating system project called Pink which was a disaster. Then there are the Yellow Box and Blue Box monickers they used a couple of years ago. These quaint little details of how Apple works are besides the point however it does show Apple's paranoid tendency towards secrecy. Remember that Foxconn employee who died after losing an iPhone prototype a couple of years back?
Certainly seems like a more viable buy to get Qt than their McAfee deal which never made any sense to me.
Not with Elop at the helm.
Given their strategy since Elop was named CEO of Nokia bankruptcy is indeed the most likely scenario.
Google already bought Motorola. They don't need another cellphone manufacturer.
The iPod was going nowhere. I still remember when it came with a Firewire connector and the software only ran on a Mac. It sold nearly nothing. Only after they switched to USB with their fourth design did it start to sell. There were plenty of other MP3 players in the market which sold a lot more units than the iPod back then.
It is only a matter of time until Android leads in Tablets like it is already leading in cellphones. There are Android cellphones cheap enough to out compete iPods. Heck there are people doing Android MP3 players as well. It is a bit of a shame no one tried to mass market the Android ARM based laptops. Those looked promising.
The Android userbase is pretty large.
Which is still longer than the time required to design a cellphone. In case you didn't notice they change the model every year.
The media is not part of the jury.
Perhaps you think consumer products are made of magic Apple pixie dust. Guess what, great components help to make a great final product. If you think Samsung does not produce innovative consumer products you are sorely mistaken. So tell where is that Apple cellphone with an OLED screen?
Samsung does not manufacture cases or boards for Apple. That is Foxconn.
So in your mind it is easier to design and manufacture a phone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard than a phone without keyboard. Fun. Both have a resistive touchscreen.
A "good read" that is fallacious. The original iPhone did not allow you to install apps either. You could only use the Apple bundled apps.
So the icon theme switched from high contrast B/W silhouettes in the F700 (if Samsung was Apple they would be saying Microsoft copied it in Window Phone 7!) to a color scheme and you think that is a radical change? I guess you never used a Symbian or Windows CE phone of the era with color icons. Samsung also manufactured those.
Of course if one has a 3x4 grid of icons and the other has a 4x4 grid of icons there is blatant copying! Only in the minds of Apple users of course. Ever considered the cellphone screen dimensions are not the same? Once the screen size is increased of course it makes sense to add more icons and you naturally get to the 4x4. You will notice Samsung also did that in the Samsung Tab which has an even wider screen where the icon grid width was extended to 5 columns. Of course there the Apple fanatic which did these slides suddenly didn't consider the icon grid dimensions to be important as a comparison measure anymore for the tablets. Pathetic! Both have an iconic quick access bar. Heck even Symbian phones had that except to save space (low resolution screen) they used text menus rather than icons. The text menus allowed you to place a call to a cellphone number or a contact in your contact list (sounds familiar?). You could also send an SMS (sounds familiar?).
Black gray and silver? My old Samsung LCD monitor purchased before the iPhone was announced also uses those colors in the device. As did my old SE cellphone from 2005. Is it suddenly forbidden to use those colors because Apple uses them? The Apple standard icon color scheme is suspiciously similar to the CSS 2.1 Web standard color scheme. The icons are obviously not the same. The icon background which makes icons look like rounded buttons was probably added so that people don't mistakenly click on the wrong icon with their fat fingers. Apparently they realized people don't miss the mark as easily as they thought and made them transparent. They seemed to be concerned with the users hitting the icon in the F700 so much that they even highlight the background, row, column in question. Probably the touch recognition was noisier. This all seems pretty obvious to me.