I don't know why this thing is being compared to Origami - it's closer to the size of a Sony Viao. Which begs the question, why would you want something that size that doesn't hve all the functionality of a laptop?
I think it's pretty difficult to improve your writing significantly without doing a lot of reading. Maybe that goes without saying, but it isn't mentioned much in the other posts here. At any rate, practice in the form of reading is probably as important as practice in the form of writing, if only for the simple reason that it is almost exclusively the written word that is grammatically correct in our society these days. Without having done a lot of reading, a person can only write in the way they would normally speak, and our normal speach is appalling in terms of grammar.
When Vista comes out, potentially their market is going to quickly dry up.
Did I miss a meeting? Since when is Vista going to be immune from viruses? I know MS has all sorts of anti-virus measures planned, from making Vista itself more secure to introducing its own anti-virus/anti-spyware app(s). But I seem to recall hearing the same thing about XP, and 2000 before that, and NT, and 98, and, and, and...
As for Mac purchasers being more computer savy. I don't really consider the majority of the artsy, yuppies that are the majority of the Mac audiance to be over savy.
You're probably right and I personally share your opinion, but you'd lend more weight to our position by using complete sentences and non-random punction, and by spelling 'savvy' correctly...
[Poverty] means making do with a two year old car and three year old computer.
If you honestly think that's the extent of the hardship that poor people in this country endure, well that makes you not only ignorant, naive, and shortsighted, it makes you a disgrace to your family, your school and (presumably) university, and your country. Oh, and did I mention that it also brands you a moronic pompous ass and demotes you from 'human being' to 'piece of shit'? Let them eat cake, right? (I don't know why I bother, you're probably too ignorant to even understand that reference).
In this reality - food is more expensive than it was 25 years ago. Your reality may differ.
Are you actually one of the three people on slashdot who is not familiar with the concept of inflation? Even though a burger and fries cost 20 cents in 1950 the real cost in terms of a percentage of income and as a percentage of the cost of living has changed dramatically. Specifically, in 1970 food constituted 39% of expenditure for those at or below the poverty line. Today it constitutes only 16% of expenditure for that group. Why? Because relative to the overall cost of living, food is cheaper today than it was several decades ago. Rent and health care, on the other hand, are much more expensive.
Hmmm, I wonder why this could be? Maybe because the food industry has been industrialized? Perhaps you're aware that the industrialization of other industries, like textiles, made things like cloth a lot cheaper than when they were made by hand? Does 'industrial revolution' mean anything to you? Does the ol' cotton gin and spinning jenny ring a bell? Well, surprise, surprise, food is cheaper now than in the past for the same reasons. Rent and health care, on the other hand, are more expensive because land is more valuable now than in the past, and because health care no longer provided free to the poor by the government.
I'm sorry but your claims don't jive with the evidence that I can see with my own eyes.
You need to get out more.
The other posters in this thread have done a good job with parallel replies already, so I'll just use their words:
Analog Pengiun wrote: "The poor in this country, whom you so patronizingly label with quotation marks, are often obese because the cheapest foods are also the highest in fat and sugar while being lowest in actual nutritional content. But good job there on the attempt to imply that they're neither poor nor hardworking because they're obese."
Valdrax wrote: "I live in Atlanta. The crappiest place to rent I know is a place where a friend of mine who works in a call center for a car rental chain lives. Rent there is just under $600/month, and it's a complete slum. Heck, my aparment's kind of seedy, and it's $750/month. You don't start getting into "nice" communities until you break $900/month. Of course, that doesn't count the $200+/month in gas, water, electricity, and phone service, much less internet, cellphone, gasoline, and food.
The working poor are also often squeezed by having absolutely no savings. If you don't have a full first month's rent saved up, you might end up in some place that charges you an obsence month-to-month or worse week-to-week rate. This is where the truly desperate get trapped. You pay too much for rent to save up enough money to pay less for rent."
I'll only add that you've had the wool pulled over your eyes like so many millions of other educated, middle-class people by all the economic soundbyte bullshit spewed by the politicians, the media, and Wall Street, none of whom are even remotely in touch with people who have to work 2 jobs for less than $8/hour just to scrape by in a slum without health insurance. Maybe you missed the meeting, but the whole 'trickle down' thing didn't pan out. People at the bottom by and large see absolutely no benefit from a booming economy. Minimum wage workers provide essential services: they cook and serve food; they mop floors and clean toilets. Maybe you missed that meeting too, but when the economy heads south food still gets cooked and served and floors and toilets still get cleaned. What happens is that the middle-class gets squeezed while the rich just wait out the winter in Hawaii. Well we're not talking about anything near the middle-class here, we're talking about poor people. Maybe you've heard of them? Or perhaps you were just thinking about the other kids on your college campus who don't have enough money for beer this weekend.
My advice is that you try getting off your high horse and go out and live for a month in a shithole innercity ghetto and just see for yourself how easy it is to work 12 hours a day just so you can make rent and can only afford to eat fast food and processed garbage (hmm, $4.50 for a gallon of milk or 79 cents for a 2 liter of Coke?). Feel free to take along a kid or two and see if you can manage to pay for their daycare and food and clothes and braces at the same time.
If you think poverty is not a problem in this country, you are living in fantasyland. Poverty is an enormous problem, it just isn't a problem for you.
the study results compensate for income, education, age, race and gender
You may find my lack of faith in the power of statistical 'compensation' disturbing, but it seems to me that poverty is a bigger problem in a country with dramatically fewer government-provided support mechanisms for citizens. The NHS, for all its problems, offers vastly greater security - both physical and psychological - to impoverished British citizens than the level of security (or lack thereof) that poor Americans without healthcare have to endure. I have no doubt there may be other factors in the US environment (physical, chemical, biological, etc) that make Americans sicker than Brits. But I have no confidence from the information in TFA that this study was even remotely successful or comprehensive in isolating those factors from the overarching social and psychological factors at work which include, but are not limited to, poverty.
So, the claim that poverty is irrelevant is at the very least shortsighted and naive, though it is more probably just plain moronic.
Spot on, poster. One point you missed though: despite the long hours and few vacation days in the US, there are more Americans in poverty now in real terms than at any time since the Great Depression. For tens of millions of Americans, despite all the work they are still dirt poor. This is for several reasons:
- Minimum wage is not tied to any meaningful cost of living index.
- The official 'Poverty Line' is similarly not based on any meaningful cost of living index (it is uselessly taken as 3 times the cost of food; food is dramatically cheaper now than even 25 years ago, and much less healthy, so this metric is positively retarded).
- Rent on property has gone sky high as the economy has grown, meaning the cost of even the crappiest housing is essentially unaffordable for a minimum wage worker.
And lastly, Employers are becoming increasingly exploitative, harkening back to 19th Century labor practices. Labor is less organized now and unions are weaker (where is a Wal Mart workers union for their 900,000 employees?). With so-called 'unskilled' jobs, employers encourage high turnover so they don't have to give pay increases with all sorts of draconian practices.
On this last point, culpability falls largely on the government. Without regulation, unbridled capitalism is taken America steadily in the direction of Asian sweatshops. Supply and demand in the labor market defies all textbook economic logic because workers have no time to shop around for the best jobs, or to switch jobs when a better one becomes available and because they have no access to information about what other jobs might be available. Sure, you might get a dollar an hour more somewhere else, but if they withhold the first weeks' pay there, you can never switch because you won't ever be able to pay the rent or buy food if you miss a week's wages. Millions of people are that close to the edge. And so without rules - without government regulation - keeping companies from fucking low-wage workers, guess what? Those workers get fucked.
So the point you missed is that millions of Americans are in a state of profound poverty. Sure, the US has pretty good general public infrastructure - roads, water, electricity - so it doesn't seem like poor people are living in the same poverty and desperation that exists in places like India, but in many instances they are. The toll on a person's health from the stress of poverty alone probably outweighs the toll of long working hours and few vacations. Bill Gates works 80-hour weeks, so I hear. He probably doesn't have the kind of stress-related health problems that a single mother holding down two jobs has, even if she only works a 60 hour week.
Be sure to read Nickel and Dimed for more information about the impossibility of surviving in America on minimum wage.
A year from now the 360 is going to be humiliated by mid-range gaming rigs.
While I'm sure what you're saying is about 95% true, and I myself am a dedicated PC gamer, I must point out that all console games on all platforms, from the Atari 260 to the PS2, have demonstrated the ability to improve with age. Later games invariably have superior graphics etc to the earlier games. I've heard several explanations for this, the main two of which are: a) Programmers become more competent with the fixed and unchanging platform, and find ways to wring more performance out of it; and b) Earlier games are deliberately 'crippled' for marketing purposes in order to maintain demand and longevity of the console.
Probably it is a bit more of the former and a bit less of the latter. Either way, later games can be very impressive. Compare a new PS2 title like 24 to an older title like GTA3, for example.
I think the parallel on the PC platform exists, but in a more limited and certainly complicated fashion. 3D engines, for example, tend to deliver better performance over time not only as a result of faster hardware but as a result of better coding (and of course evolution of the engine itself).
I'd be interested to know which search engine generates most revenue for the browser company. After all, Mozilla gets a penny or two every time you do a google search in Firefox and click through an ad, or something like that. Obviously for IE7 the MSN generates the most revenue for the browser company: Microsoft.
What about Edison? He rolled out electrical power at least, even if he didn't invent it. Does that mean he 'created' every job in the modern world? Or what about the fellow in Mesopotamia 8,000 years ago who invented the wheel? How many jobs did he create?
Seems largely retarded to take credit for jobs created indirectly, since there's no logical place to draw boundaries in either space or time.
Of course part of the motivation for producers introducing (and presumably later switching entirely to) the new HD standards is to fatten their revenue streams.
But I wonder if there is incentive to push ever more data-hungry formats for anti-piracy reasons. I mean, a movie in full HD is going to contain a lot more data than a a DVD, and vastly more than a VCD or some divx et al codec rip. P2P file sharing of movies that are, what, 5GB+ is going to be harder than file sharing music, right?
Obviously it's not the whole story, but isn't it a factor in the minds of the movie studio execs? I rarely see it mentioned or discussed in these threads though.
Basically, as far as computers go I am clinically retarded compared to most Linux users. But I DO plan to switch from Windows soon. And I WILL RTFM. There really isn't any other option, is there?
Which brings me to point out the obvious: you really don't need to RTFM with Windows. I have never even cracked the cover on a Windows manual, which of course goes a long way to explaining why I'm a computer retard... then again, I can still somehow manage to post here with html tags. For the majority of everyday computer-illiterate non-power users like me (all billion of us), it simply isn't necessary to RTFM to use Windows.
Maybe - just maybe - that is one of the secrets to Windows' successful domination of the market, though I suppose I could be wrong.
I'm not sure I fully understand the logic of "laptop replacements" or even "desktop replacements" (referring to laptops) for that matter. Since technology continues to progress exponentially, there will - at any given time - always be things a desktop can do that cannot be 'replaced' by a concurrent laptop. And similarly, there are always things a laptop can do that cannot be 'replaced' by a concurrent handheld device.
The only exception to this fairly self-evident situation is one of marketing: an older, cheaper laptop can in some - and only some - ways be 'replaced' by a bleeding-edge laptop, etc, etc.
So really, it is a matter of deciding for yourself what functionality you want from a device and determining if the technology and/or market are available for that functionality. If all you want a computer for is word processing, spreadsheets, and solitaire on a 15 inch screen (like the majority of people, say, 10 years ago), then even the cheapest current laptop will fulfill those functional requirements. But if you want 3D gaming, wireless internet access, 5.1 surround sound, and dual-head 22" displays, well you're not going to get that on anything but a desktop for the time being.
The problem is that handheld devices still cannot really fulfill the lowest-common-denominator functional requirements (office apps, simple games, music, telephony, internet, and email) adequately for 2 main reasons: display size and input quality (ie: keyboard and mouse).
Personally, I have no interest in editing text documents or spreadsheets, playing games, or watching movies with a stylus on a 2" x 3" touchscreen. I might read (but not write) email and check RSS newsfeeds, but that's all I'm comfortable doing without a large screen and a keyboard and mouse, or equally functional input devices (ie: voice recognition and pupil-driven pointing device).
I'm sure the technology will bring the functionality I need to handheld devices quite soon, but we're definitely not there yet. So for the time being, when I'm on the move it makes more sense for me to have a phone I can check email with and/or a laptop to actually do work on.
Once they get this stuff stitched into clothing, it's going to be just about unbearable. As if all the marketing crap of t-shirts wasn't bad enough already, what with our entire culture expressing individuality by paying corporations for the privalege of advertising their products on our bodies, now people are actually going to be lit up like downtown Tokyo. Fan-fuckin-tastic...
Well, I suppose the Tron Guy is going to have a field day with this stuff, so it's not all gloom and doom...
A central issue remains for bionics: will biotech make it redundant?
Sure, having an exoskeleton that makes you stronger will continue to have utility, but will we really need bionics in, say, 20 years if new biological eyes or arms or legs can be grown using a person's own DNA?
Seems to me that it's always helicopters that are being lost, not tanks. I can't remember ever seeing an article in the news about a tank being destroyed, but helicopters have been dropping like flies in Iraq.
So how about using this Point Defense System on vehicles that are demonstrably vulnerable, instead of on juggernauts that apparently don't need as much protection.
I'm not much of a Mac person, nor much of a computer person for that matter. So I think I can speak better for the unwashed masses than most other slashdotters! From my POV, this has been a very, very long time coming. Being a PC user isn't really a choice in my line of work - I'm stuck on the bandwagon with the dominant M$ market standards of Windows and Office. And I'm not wealthy, so buying a good Mac has never been an option (I almost got an iMac once though...). But if I can run OSX and XP/Vista out of the same box just by choosing between the two on start-up, that is absolutely ideal.
Basically, the benefits will come to the consumer as a result of teir being genuine direct competition in the marketplace. Right now, competition between Mac and PC is not as direct as it could be because of the hardware divide. Hardware commonality means that Mac OS and MS Windows will finally get to go head-to-head. And guess who wins? The consumer! Speaking for casual users, I think that's what we've all been waiting for.
And lastly, I think this will serve to bring down the wall between the Mac and PC camp, and hopefully help to get rid of some of the Us versus Them mentality, especially among casual computer users.
The global warming issue is a textbook example of the very unfortunate and worrisome fact that politics is not about truth. It never has been. The same goes for religion. Back when religion and politics were the same thing (and as they still are in some parts of the world today), religion was able to claim the only authoritative access to Truth. But since science began soundly bitch-slapping religion in the arena of Truth in the last century or two, people have become increasingly jaded with both religion and its bedfellow politics.
The thing is, the people want both religion and politics to be abou truth. We all have a primal need for our 'team' (ie: tribe) to be correct. We all want to believe our side is the Good Guys. The problem, as people become better educated, it becomes harder and harder for any but the most ignorant and gullible to buy into centuries-old superstitious nonsense of religion or the greed-saddled crap spewed out by politics.
If we ever have political leadership that genuinely prioritizes truth as their policy, that is when we will see a resurgence in interest from the populous. Until then, people are too bored with the gigantic quagmire of lies to care whether something is coming from one rich white guys' camp or the other.
Some people are able to tune out their environment and focus on their work with relatively little effort. For others, such as myself, the details of my environment have a major impact on my productivity. I'm no Feng Shui guru or anything like that, but I'd hazard to guess that there are a lot of folks out there who share my sentiments. I just find it easier to work when things are right where they feel like they should be. To me, it's about removing barriers and obstacles to productivity more than anything else. The buzzing, rattling fan on my PC's power supply is an obstacle to my productivity. The glare on my screen from the wondow behind my desk is an obstacle to my productivity.
If I was Bill Gates, my office would be free from all such obstacles. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be plush and swank, but you can be damn sure there would be no noisy CPU fans or flickering flourescent lights or any of a hundred other things that distract and annoy and grate that are found in a normal office environment.
I've no problem with people who actively and honestly choose to believe their religion over science, as long as they're honest about what they're doing.
I think you speak for everyone when you say that honesty is a quality to be appreciated in other people. But, sorry, I still have a problem with people who choose to believe religion over science. That is, quite simply and in no uncertain terms, asinine.
Honesty I have no problem with. Freedom of choice I have no problem with. But stupidity? Stupidity I have a problem with.
I like Gmail, and the conversations view is a pretty intuitive method of organization, but I have to confess I get irritated not being able to switch to a chronological or other category-sorted view with the click of a button. To Google's credit, I submitted feedback to that effect and was pleased to see it was one of the commonly-requested features, so hopefully we'll see that functionality in upcoming versions.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why this thing is being compared to Origami - it's closer to the size of a Sony Viao. Which begs the question, why would you want something that size that doesn't hve all the functionality of a laptop?
I think it's pretty difficult to improve your writing significantly without doing a lot of reading. Maybe that goes without saying, but it isn't mentioned much in the other posts here. At any rate, practice in the form of reading is probably as important as practice in the form of writing, if only for the simple reason that it is almost exclusively the written word that is grammatically correct in our society these days. Without having done a lot of reading, a person can only write in the way they would normally speak, and our normal speach is appalling in terms of grammar.
No denying it, I made a big ol' ass outta myself there!
Did I miss a meeting? Since when is Vista going to be immune from viruses? I know MS has all sorts of anti-virus measures planned, from making Vista itself more secure to introducing its own anti-virus/anti-spyware app(s). But I seem to recall hearing the same thing about XP, and 2000 before that, and NT, and 98, and, and, and...
You're probably right and I personally share your opinion, but you'd lend more weight to our position by using complete sentences and non-random punction, and by spelling 'savvy' correctly...
If you honestly think that's the extent of the hardship that poor people in this country endure, well that makes you not only ignorant, naive, and shortsighted, it makes you a disgrace to your family, your school and (presumably) university, and your country. Oh, and did I mention that it also brands you a moronic pompous ass and demotes you from 'human being' to 'piece of shit'? Let them eat cake, right? (I don't know why I bother, you're probably too ignorant to even understand that reference).
In this reality - food is more expensive than it was 25 years ago. Your reality may differ.
Are you actually one of the three people on slashdot who is not familiar with the concept of inflation? Even though a burger and fries cost 20 cents in 1950 the real cost in terms of a percentage of income and as a percentage of the cost of living has changed dramatically. Specifically, in 1970 food constituted 39% of expenditure for those at or below the poverty line. Today it constitutes only 16% of expenditure for that group. Why? Because relative to the overall cost of living, food is cheaper today than it was several decades ago. Rent and health care, on the other hand, are much more expensive.
Hmmm, I wonder why this could be? Maybe because the food industry has been industrialized? Perhaps you're aware that the industrialization of other industries, like textiles, made things like cloth a lot cheaper than when they were made by hand? Does 'industrial revolution' mean anything to you? Does the ol' cotton gin and spinning jenny ring a bell? Well, surprise, surprise, food is cheaper now than in the past for the same reasons. Rent and health care, on the other hand, are more expensive because land is more valuable now than in the past, and because health care no longer provided free to the poor by the government.
How's that for my reality?
You need to get out more.
The other posters in this thread have done a good job with parallel replies already, so I'll just use their words:
Analog Pengiun wrote: "The poor in this country, whom you so patronizingly label with quotation marks, are often obese because the cheapest foods are also the highest in fat and sugar while being lowest in actual nutritional content. But good job there on the attempt to imply that they're neither poor nor hardworking because they're obese."
Valdrax wrote: "I live in Atlanta. The crappiest place to rent I know is a place where a friend of mine who works in a call center for a car rental chain lives. Rent there is just under $600/month, and it's a complete slum. Heck, my aparment's kind of seedy, and it's $750/month. You don't start getting into "nice" communities until you break $900/month. Of course, that doesn't count the $200+/month in gas, water, electricity, and phone service, much less internet, cellphone, gasoline, and food.
The working poor are also often squeezed by having absolutely no savings. If you don't have a full first month's rent saved up, you might end up in some place that charges you an obsence month-to-month or worse week-to-week rate. This is where the truly desperate get trapped. You pay too much for rent to save up enough money to pay less for rent."
I'll only add that you've had the wool pulled over your eyes like so many millions of other educated, middle-class people by all the economic soundbyte bullshit spewed by the politicians, the media, and Wall Street, none of whom are even remotely in touch with people who have to work 2 jobs for less than $8/hour just to scrape by in a slum without health insurance. Maybe you missed the meeting, but the whole 'trickle down' thing didn't pan out. People at the bottom by and large see absolutely no benefit from a booming economy. Minimum wage workers provide essential services: they cook and serve food; they mop floors and clean toilets. Maybe you missed that meeting too, but when the economy heads south food still gets cooked and served and floors and toilets still get cleaned. What happens is that the middle-class gets squeezed while the rich just wait out the winter in Hawaii. Well we're not talking about anything near the middle-class here, we're talking about poor people. Maybe you've heard of them? Or perhaps you were just thinking about the other kids on your college campus who don't have enough money for beer this weekend.
My advice is that you try getting off your high horse and go out and live for a month in a shithole innercity ghetto and just see for yourself how easy it is to work 12 hours a day just so you can make rent and can only afford to eat fast food and processed garbage (hmm, $4.50 for a gallon of milk or 79 cents for a 2 liter of Coke?). Feel free to take along a kid or two and see if you can manage to pay for their daycare and food and clothes and braces at the same time.
If you think poverty is not a problem in this country, you are living in fantasyland. Poverty is an enormous problem, it just isn't a problem for you.
You may find my lack of faith in the power of statistical 'compensation' disturbing, but it seems to me that poverty is a bigger problem in a country with dramatically fewer government-provided support mechanisms for citizens. The NHS, for all its problems, offers vastly greater security - both physical and psychological - to impoverished British citizens than the level of security (or lack thereof) that poor Americans without healthcare have to endure. I have no doubt there may be other factors in the US environment (physical, chemical, biological, etc) that make Americans sicker than Brits. But I have no confidence from the information in TFA that this study was even remotely successful or comprehensive in isolating those factors from the overarching social and psychological factors at work which include, but are not limited to, poverty.
So, the claim that poverty is irrelevant is at the very least shortsighted and naive, though it is more probably just plain moronic.
Spot on, poster. One point you missed though: despite the long hours and few vacation days in the US, there are more Americans in poverty now in real terms than at any time since the Great Depression. For tens of millions of Americans, despite all the work they are still dirt poor. This is for several reasons:
- Minimum wage is not tied to any meaningful cost of living index.
- The official 'Poverty Line' is similarly not based on any meaningful cost of living index (it is uselessly taken as 3 times the cost of food; food is dramatically cheaper now than even 25 years ago, and much less healthy, so this metric is positively retarded).
- Rent on property has gone sky high as the economy has grown, meaning the cost of even the crappiest housing is essentially unaffordable for a minimum wage worker.
And lastly, Employers are becoming increasingly exploitative, harkening back to 19th Century labor practices. Labor is less organized now and unions are weaker (where is a Wal Mart workers union for their 900,000 employees?). With so-called 'unskilled' jobs, employers encourage high turnover so they don't have to give pay increases with all sorts of draconian practices.
On this last point, culpability falls largely on the government. Without regulation, unbridled capitalism is taken America steadily in the direction of Asian sweatshops. Supply and demand in the labor market defies all textbook economic logic because workers have no time to shop around for the best jobs, or to switch jobs when a better one becomes available and because they have no access to information about what other jobs might be available. Sure, you might get a dollar an hour more somewhere else, but if they withhold the first weeks' pay there, you can never switch because you won't ever be able to pay the rent or buy food if you miss a week's wages. Millions of people are that close to the edge. And so without rules - without government regulation - keeping companies from fucking low-wage workers, guess what? Those workers get fucked.
So the point you missed is that millions of Americans are in a state of profound poverty. Sure, the US has pretty good general public infrastructure - roads, water, electricity - so it doesn't seem like poor people are living in the same poverty and desperation that exists in places like India, but in many instances they are. The toll on a person's health from the stress of poverty alone probably outweighs the toll of long working hours and few vacations. Bill Gates works 80-hour weeks, so I hear. He probably doesn't have the kind of stress-related health problems that a single mother holding down two jobs has, even if she only works a 60 hour week.
Be sure to read Nickel and Dimed for more information about the impossibility of surviving in America on minimum wage.
While I'm sure what you're saying is about 95% true, and I myself am a dedicated PC gamer, I must point out that all console games on all platforms, from the Atari 260 to the PS2, have demonstrated the ability to improve with age. Later games invariably have superior graphics etc to the earlier games. I've heard several explanations for this, the main two of which are: a) Programmers become more competent with the fixed and unchanging platform, and find ways to wring more performance out of it; and b) Earlier games are deliberately 'crippled' for marketing purposes in order to maintain demand and longevity of the console.
Probably it is a bit more of the former and a bit less of the latter. Either way, later games can be very impressive. Compare a new PS2 title like 24 to an older title like GTA3, for example.
I think the parallel on the PC platform exists, but in a more limited and certainly complicated fashion. 3D engines, for example, tend to deliver better performance over time not only as a result of faster hardware but as a result of better coding (and of course evolution of the engine itself).
I'd be interested to know which search engine generates most revenue for the browser company. After all, Mozilla gets a penny or two every time you do a google search in Firefox and click through an ad, or something like that. Obviously for IE7 the MSN generates the most revenue for the browser company: Microsoft.
Seems largely retarded to take credit for jobs created indirectly, since there's no logical place to draw boundaries in either space or time.
But I wonder if there is incentive to push ever more data-hungry formats for anti-piracy reasons. I mean, a movie in full HD is going to contain a lot more data than a a DVD, and vastly more than a VCD or some divx et al codec rip. P2P file sharing of movies that are, what, 5GB+ is going to be harder than file sharing music, right?
Obviously it's not the whole story, but isn't it a factor in the minds of the movie studio execs? I rarely see it mentioned or discussed in these threads though.
Which brings me to point out the obvious: you really don't need to RTFM with Windows. I have never even cracked the cover on a Windows manual, which of course goes a long way to explaining why I'm a computer retard ... then again, I can still somehow manage to post here with html tags. For the majority of everyday computer-illiterate non-power users like me (all billion of us), it simply isn't necessary to RTFM to use Windows.
Maybe - just maybe - that is one of the secrets to Windows' successful domination of the market, though I suppose I could be wrong.
The only exception to this fairly self-evident situation is one of marketing: an older, cheaper laptop can in some - and only some - ways be 'replaced' by a bleeding-edge laptop, etc, etc.
So really, it is a matter of deciding for yourself what functionality you want from a device and determining if the technology and/or market are available for that functionality. If all you want a computer for is word processing, spreadsheets, and solitaire on a 15 inch screen (like the majority of people, say, 10 years ago), then even the cheapest current laptop will fulfill those functional requirements. But if you want 3D gaming, wireless internet access, 5.1 surround sound, and dual-head 22" displays, well you're not going to get that on anything but a desktop for the time being.
The problem is that handheld devices still cannot really fulfill the lowest-common-denominator functional requirements (office apps, simple games, music, telephony, internet, and email) adequately for 2 main reasons: display size and input quality (ie: keyboard and mouse).
Personally, I have no interest in editing text documents or spreadsheets, playing games, or watching movies with a stylus on a 2" x 3" touchscreen. I might read (but not write) email and check RSS newsfeeds, but that's all I'm comfortable doing without a large screen and a keyboard and mouse, or equally functional input devices (ie: voice recognition and pupil-driven pointing device).
I'm sure the technology will bring the functionality I need to handheld devices quite soon, but we're definitely not there yet. So for the time being, when I'm on the move it makes more sense for me to have a phone I can check email with and/or a laptop to actually do work on.
Which of course means that what they should be using are hacked XBOX 360s running Linux...
Well, I suppose the Tron Guy is going to have a field day with this stuff, so it's not all gloom and doom...
Sure, having an exoskeleton that makes you stronger will continue to have utility, but will we really need bionics in, say, 20 years if new biological eyes or arms or legs can be grown using a person's own DNA?
So how about using this Point Defense System on vehicles that are demonstrably vulnerable, instead of on juggernauts that apparently don't need as much protection.
Basically, the benefits will come to the consumer as a result of teir being genuine direct competition in the marketplace. Right now, competition between Mac and PC is not as direct as it could be because of the hardware divide. Hardware commonality means that Mac OS and MS Windows will finally get to go head-to-head. And guess who wins? The consumer! Speaking for casual users, I think that's what we've all been waiting for.
And lastly, I think this will serve to bring down the wall between the Mac and PC camp, and hopefully help to get rid of some of the Us versus Them mentality, especially among casual computer users.
The thing is, the people want both religion and politics to be abou truth. We all have a primal need for our 'team' (ie: tribe) to be correct. We all want to believe our side is the Good Guys. The problem, as people become better educated, it becomes harder and harder for any but the most ignorant and gullible to buy into centuries-old superstitious nonsense of religion or the greed-saddled crap spewed out by politics.
If we ever have political leadership that genuinely prioritizes truth as their policy, that is when we will see a resurgence in interest from the populous. Until then, people are too bored with the gigantic quagmire of lies to care whether something is coming from one rich white guys' camp or the other.
One could argue that a core responsibility of leaders i to inspire people to care about the right things...
If I was Bill Gates, my office would be free from all such obstacles. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be plush and swank, but you can be damn sure there would be no noisy CPU fans or flickering flourescent lights or any of a hundred other things that distract and annoy and grate that are found in a normal office environment.
I think you speak for everyone when you say that honesty is a quality to be appreciated in other people. But, sorry, I still have a problem with people who choose to believe religion over science. That is, quite simply and in no uncertain terms, asinine.
Honesty I have no problem with. Freedom of choice I have no problem with. But stupidity? Stupidity I have a problem with.
I like Gmail, and the conversations view is a pretty intuitive method of organization, but I have to confess I get irritated not being able to switch to a chronological or other category-sorted view with the click of a button. To Google's credit, I submitted feedback to that effect and was pleased to see it was one of the commonly-requested features, so hopefully we'll see that functionality in upcoming versions.