Whether it's worse for their PR image and sales to delay the game or release a mess. Considering the level of anticipation involved, it might go either way.
Does Bill Gates seem to look more scary as he ages? That grin he has in the caption picture looks quite devious.
Oh, and like the majority of/., I think he's up to something with this move.
A useful general power solution too
on
Solar Window Panes
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If I understand this right, we don't necessarily have to put these in windows to use their power. They could be railings on walkways, desks, sculptures....lots of possibilities.
Maybe someday everything we build will take solar energy.
Then it is the students who are being cheated by a teacher using the software that doesn't double-check the material on his own. They will go through the class without having their mistakes caught. While the erosion of standards that a flawed proofing program might bring isn't likely to be enormous, it's kind of strange to think that the future of the English language would be in part determined by a development team piece of software.
Hope it works well, though, and gets used as a proper checking tool.
Tech & business - and software vs. hardware
on
The Innovators' Ball
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Cringely leaves things hanging in his article; it's mostly a rant about "oh no, big tech companies become evil for their own survival." Lots of companies in lots of industries become evil for their own survival. It's known as part of an "economic moat" - once you're the leader, you want to stay ahead forever, so you do whatever you can to acheave that goal.
Depending on your business, the answer may or may not involve crushing your rivals. A company like Johnson & Johnson, with most of its revenue coming from drug patents(in addition to the other diverse health care needs like shampoo and whatnot), is going to stay ahead by getting new patents through R&D. A company like Wal-Mart, on the other hand, cannot win on the quality of its retail operations alone, since there will always be specialized businesses that can beat the "superstore" concept for price, quality, or service in any one area. So it runs the competition out of town by losing money on a store for some time, and then enjoys the advantages of monopoly by overpricing and using the money to continue its expansion.
So why is tech a business where the most successful companies have to work like Wal-Mart?
In tech, unlike with pharmecuticals, the comparative lack of patenting makes it extremely difficult to maintain the moat. In effect, anything new quickly turns into a "commodity item," especially with software ideas. And products are hard to sell to consumers through the qualities of efficency, stability or security. This encourages almost all software for the end-user to be fairly bloated and unwieldy, because the alterative is to let the competition have more features and look better. And in turn, everyone has to re-invent the wheel for their own product; very wasteful and costly. This encourages evil strategies.
This is also why open-source has had great success - the amount of specialized training and materials needed for a software project to succeed is quite small; one talented programmer and his computer will often do. In addition, successive projects build on the old ones, so even if people on/. keep saying that all that's being done is a great game of catch-up with Microsoft, it is becoming a visible possibility that MS will be caught-up with.
In turn, it may happen that the business of software will actually shrink, replacing the old closed-source model with an open-source one. Development funding and jobs would then come from service-oriented enterprises and public entities, instead of companies solely focused on having the dominant product in their field.
In other tech industries it's slightly less clear, since they tend to deal with projects requiring a fairly large materials and infrastructure investment. They do not face the problem of easily being challenged by an small upstart. Thus their business strategy is likely to be less dirty and more benefical in a social sense. Their major problem is not one of retaining a dominant product that can be revised - it is of bringing out a new dominant product with each new business cycle. Since their competition usually can't be seen until it clobbers them at retail, dirty tactics are much harder to enact. For example, 3d cards - each generation has brought a slightly different competitive mix, with winners of one cycle suddenly disappearing in the next, though recently it seems to have settled between ATI and Nvidia.
I live in San Francisco right now, though I will soon move for college. The Metreon is an excellent location for this sort of thing, because it has a very video-gamey feeling about it. The architecture is very futuristic, and there are big shiny lights in and around the building itself.
However, I often go to the Metreon and don't spend a thing, because they often put up gimmicky things like this and I'll go regularly to check for a new exhibit. When Minority Report was in theaters they had the cool car design in it on display, in full scale. Last time I went they had an "interactive projector" where you blocked the projector's light from above with your body and it changed what was displayed in that area - for example, revealing a new picture, or making ripples.
Sometimes they still manage to suck me in and play their DDREX machine, though. But $2 for five songs is too much! As are the $2 sodas.
Let's say we weren't talking merely about Valve's relatively small product line here, but a large publisher, like all of Sierra. Buying a subscription for a month or two would allow you to play through and enjoy EVERY game in the collection at least once, like a rental without the middleman. When you finish, you let the subscription expire, and then if you want to go back to one of the games you can buy the boxed version and keep it forever.
I think it's a wonderful idea, personally, though Valve is taking a risk in trying it with so few products to offer...
But someone had to be first and I'd say they do a good job business-wise even though they're a little frustrating when they do things differently from any other industry company. Anyone else, if we exclude 3drealms and DNF, would have had HL2 out in a year or two.
I think these two comic formats have very different venues from each other. A comic book is meant to have more than a 10-second total viewing time, and usually has a more involved story and has a larger time to develop the action. The strip, on the other hand, must be satisfy the reader on a daily basis, and usually has to stick to formulaic jokes in three or four panels to succeed.
Correspondingly, in the physical world, the comic book is sold by itself, while the comic strip is tossed in amid a sea of other reading material(other comics, ads, articles...) and left to "sink or swim" as it will.
I think a similar dynamic applies online. The web-comic in strip format generally relies on advertising to succeed, but a full web-comic book might get somewhere through micropayments.
But I can say fairly confidently that nobody would pay money to view one strip.
I read in the paper(or was it a magazine?) recently that compared digital thumbprint scanners that could be used with a PC's USB port. The prices given for these scanners were mostly in the low $100 range, but the minimum was more like $70. The quality on them was generally good(with the occasional misses, but retrying corrected the problem).
The software they came with didn't seem to have a "signature" feature, just a "password-entry" one, but the technology could probably be applied fairly easily to that sort of endeavor. In a few years or so the price will drop enough so that everyone can afford them, and we won't need this sort of stuff anymore.
Of course, there's the problem of people with no thumbs, or thumbprints(a rare condition), and people who steal thumbs on the black market...but we can deal with that as it comes up:P
If you haven't noticed, when people are unemployed, they find other outlets for their time and energy, whether that's volunteer work, going back to school, or starting their own business.
All that is really needed to make a smooth transition is extensive amounts of education for a new set of jobs.
Consider: If the cost of food and manual labor services drops to near zero, then people will have MORE money to spend on other items. Therefore those industries when human abilities are still needed will GROW tremendously, and the consumption of travel, entertainment and other luxuries will become even more widespread than they are today. As has happened previously throughout the centuries, innovation will gain in value relative to craftsmanship(we don't see scribes or blacksmiths around much anymore except as a luxury service - we can manufacture what they used to do for us. Likewise with the move towards abstracted art - photographs can contain more realism than any painting)
This will in turn cause those businesses to expand, demand new jobs, etc. and therefore solve our problems, and while it might be a rough few years during the transition, people will eventually find the skills the new economy will require.
Of course, if humans become obsolete in all respects, that's another thing altogether...
The gaming industry has had a "high" and a "low" level since, I'd say, around the mid-80s. The "high" level uses money and experience to use computer/console technology to its fullest. Things like the first games using digitized pictures and voices were used to pull in players. Later on, FMV, and CGI cutscenes, or even full games out of them(Myst) were made. We've been going through an era of 3d, most recently(though the 3d perspective has been around from the beginning, with games like Battlezone and Elite and Castle Master; it's just recently that it started getting a competitive wow-factor compared with sprites). Throughout, there's always been a group of little guys, just a little bit behind but determined to keep up.
They can keep up because the tools to do what was expensive a few years ago are affordable today. I'll cite an example of my own creation: Using the free integrated development tool, "Game Maker," I made a game in 72 hours for a competition. You can see the game here on Simtel. It's a fairly simple kind of game that you might've seen in the mid to late 80s selling for $30-40, and likely with graphics of lesser quality, too(the tiles probably would have been better and more diverse with more time to play with them, but they didn't have the same resolution or color depth then). It would have taken probably at least a month to make, depending on the platform. But I did a 2003 equivalent in three days, with 10 levels, sound and music and recordable high scores, because I had the tools to do it.
A small team today can get into game development through the shareware market, which has always had its share of diamonds among a rubble of uninspired clones and "1,000,000 variations on Solitare." Consider 3drealms and Epic, both of whom brought themselves up through shareware sales. There are developers today pulling out success at the "low" end, too, like Popcap, Dexterity, and GarageGames. But you'll notice that they never go in the console market, because consoles realistically are a playground for the industry giants, with a market that faces significant challenge in expanding demographic reach(it's a chicken-egg situation - no games to appeal to a new segment, no segment to buy those games) and no method of distribution outside of retail.
A lot of attention is put on the console market, where it seems like a lot of action takes place. And it seems like big budgets lock small developers out. But in reality, larger budgets mean less innovation. All the best games of today are evolutions or reworkings of previous games. GTA3 comes from GTA, which itself was taking a new angle on the maze games of yesteryear(Pac-Man etc.) The Sims is a new angle on Simcity. Diablo 2 is a new angle on Rogue. All the Lucasarts games have their heritage in ADVENT. These are not triumphs of technology, but good design and well-rounded development. It stands to reason that in reality, there is nothing stopping a small developer. Their only limit is that they can't push the envelope in ways that will break their bank. If they want to go for the high end, they can start small and build up with sequels that evolve the technology each time. The market will prove whether or not they are worthy. And the little guys will never get hopelessly far behind, either.
It's common for/.er's to root for open-source and Linux vs. Microsoft and their various products. But when you take an article like this into consideration, it's hard not to notice that if Microsoft loses the war, all the people they pushed into using their products will suddenly have skills they can't use. The job market will probably go through a period of turmoil, as there may not be enough of the "new skills" to go around and the MS-trained workers have to relearn a new environment.
And of course, the funding would disappear.
But all sorts of strange things seem to happen, these days, so perhaps this will come about...
I've always gone for featureset when looking at graphics cards. Speed is a secondary and usually fairly costly function.
If I need the speed, I turn off AA and lower the resolution and game detail settings. But if it's fast enough for me as is and looks like it'll suffice for a couple of years, I don't care about the benchmarks.
It's obvious to anyone who takes a decent glance at the product history of MS that they could never sell a product simply because it's faster, more secure, and more stable than previous versions. It must look cooler and have more features to be released.
When I first heard of what sort of things Longhorn would bring to the UI(m0er pretty graphix0rz), I thought it was idiotic, and just wouldn't be enough of an improvement to sell the OS to anyone(except the OEM market - IF Linux doesn't manage to shape itself into a major competitor in that market by then).
So far I don't see anything to change that opinion. The only real UI improvement I see is more text telling you what you can do in each screen, and more application-shell integration.
That's not really enough progress, in my opinion. The computer market is not growing as fast as it used to, and I think a lot of existing users, even if they aren't particularly tech-savvy, will feel absolutely insulted at an interface that babies them along, because they already took the time to learn how to do these things "themselves" on some level.
Also, it took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was going on in that volume control help dialogue. I get the impression that their excess of features is spilling over on itself and making it LESS usable than before. It looks bulky, not sleek and trim the way I think most people would want it.
And open-source continues in the rest of the world like it has, then it will be a government-backed monopoly versus an open-source world.
China may be big, but it's not THAT big. They'll eventually give up on any private company's offering, even when it's within the country, because it's quite likely that for business and personal purposes, the Chinese people will not use the government's choice, but the international one.
So if the government supports open-source, it's a good thing all around. If it doesn't, it'll be a setback but not a mighty one.
Windows will be almost gone by 2008. There will be significant improvements in all aspects of tech by then, and Linux will both carry and be carried by the waves of new devices and applications rolling out that will use Linux and therefore support it(directly or indirectly).
With a few more years of improvement at the current rate(and maybe less time if the rate increases with a larger dev-community and more funding!) Linux is likely to reach a point of critical-mass, at which point the market will suddenly flood over and give up Windows forever. This will happen even for Joe Average, as he someday discovers that he can't download or purchase much of anything new for Windows anymore. All that will remain will be Microsoft's in-house products and labels, tucked in some back corner of the computer store. And Slashdot will have to get rid of the Borg-Gates icon because it'll never be used anymore:P
...we might finally get affordable supersonic jet transportation?
I can't stand flights of over an hour or two myself, and it would probably encourage even greater mobility then we have today if it's cheap enough. For example, transcontinental dating.
I decided to go about getting a GOOD e-mail client today for college(previously using Yahoo webmail since I can reach it from anywhere and I don't really care who gets in that, so long as they aren't clever enough to start using it to request passwords to other places...but now I have a new account, so time to shift things around). I soon settled on Moz Thunderbird because I wanted to support the project and I expected it to be a lot more secure than OE.
It is fitting, then, that MS should decide not to support the client I don't want to support.
One thing that'll help Nutch financially is that they can use their technology for more than a single page running on their own servers(and taking on the huge loads that implies). They can use open-source business models instead, offering licenses with tech support, custom versions, etc.
I was always kind of worried that we might end up with an internet controlled by Google, anyway. But we'll have to wait and see if it actually works or not, anyway. I sure hope so.
When I was very little, I was unable to tell the difference between a really good game and a really bad one. They were all equal but also different. It was only later that I started to compare them with each other, and that still continues today.
I'm interested in getting into game development, and I think there are plenty of possibilities for making games that motivate people to learn. The key, I think, is in the power of games to be able to abstract the worst, least interesting bits of reality and highlight the fun stuff.
The trick is in presenting the material the right way. I know it's quite doable for physics, history, geography, and related areas - adventure and strategy games make use of that stuff all the time. It's things like higher-level math that are tougher - say you were making a game for calculus students. What would you have them do? If you just present the typical problems to them so that they cover all the bases, no advance is being made over doing problems out of a book. There aren't many exciting game-professions that you can use to give context to the calculus problems, either. It's a problem that I really can't figure out - math in a general sense is better suited to games(see all adventure games using little mini-puzzles that have no relation to the plot:P ), and I think could be resolved. But focusing on any one part of math to study invites trouble.
Neither are there any games that teach people to write well or read great literature for meaning. (You could say that the game itself has literary context, however)
Slashdot Mirror
You stop working for the network!
Whether it's worse for their PR image and sales to delay the game or release a mess. Considering the level of anticipation involved, it might go either way.
Does Bill Gates seem to look more scary as he ages? That grin he has in the caption picture looks quite devious.
/., I think he's up to something with this move.
Oh, and like the majority of
If I understand this right, we don't necessarily have to put these in windows to use their power. They could be railings on walkways, desks, sculptures....lots of possibilities.
Maybe someday everything we build will take solar energy.
Then it is the students who are being cheated by a teacher using the software that doesn't double-check the material on his own. They will go through the class without having their mistakes caught. While the erosion of standards that a flawed proofing program might bring isn't likely to be enormous, it's kind of strange to think that the future of the English language would be in part determined by a development team piece of software.
Hope it works well, though, and gets used as a proper checking tool.
Cringely leaves things hanging in his article; it's mostly a rant about "oh no, big tech companies become evil for their own survival." Lots of companies in lots of industries become evil for their own survival. It's known as part of an "economic moat" - once you're the leader, you want to stay ahead forever, so you do whatever you can to acheave that goal.
/. keep saying that all that's being done is a great game of catch-up with Microsoft, it is becoming a visible possibility that MS will be caught-up with.
Depending on your business, the answer may or may not involve crushing your rivals. A company like Johnson & Johnson, with most of its revenue coming from drug patents(in addition to the other diverse health care needs like shampoo and whatnot), is going to stay ahead by getting new patents through R&D. A company like Wal-Mart, on the other hand, cannot win on the quality of its retail operations alone, since there will always be specialized businesses that can beat the "superstore" concept for price, quality, or service in any one area. So it runs the competition out of town by losing money on a store for some time, and then enjoys the advantages of monopoly by overpricing and using the money to continue its expansion.
So why is tech a business where the most successful companies have to work like Wal-Mart?
In tech, unlike with pharmecuticals, the comparative lack of patenting makes it extremely difficult to maintain the moat. In effect, anything new quickly turns into a "commodity item," especially with software ideas. And products are hard to sell to consumers through the qualities of efficency, stability or security. This encourages almost all software for the end-user to be fairly bloated and unwieldy, because the alterative is to let the competition have more features and look better. And in turn, everyone has to re-invent the wheel for their own product; very wasteful and costly. This encourages evil strategies.
This is also why open-source has had great success - the amount of specialized training and materials needed for a software project to succeed is quite small; one talented programmer and his computer will often do. In addition, successive projects build on the old ones, so even if people on
In turn, it may happen that the business of software will actually shrink, replacing the old closed-source model with an open-source one. Development funding and jobs would then come from service-oriented enterprises and public entities, instead of companies solely focused on having the dominant product in their field.
In other tech industries it's slightly less clear, since they tend to deal with projects requiring a fairly large materials and infrastructure investment. They do not face the problem of easily being challenged by an small upstart. Thus their business strategy is likely to be less dirty and more benefical in a social sense. Their major problem is not one of retaining a dominant product that can be revised - it is of bringing out a new dominant product with each new business cycle. Since their competition usually can't be seen until it clobbers them at retail, dirty tactics are much harder to enact. For example, 3d cards - each generation has brought a slightly different competitive mix, with winners of one cycle suddenly disappearing in the next, though recently it seems to have settled between ATI and Nvidia.
I live in San Francisco right now, though I will soon move for college. The Metreon is an excellent location for this sort of thing, because it has a very video-gamey feeling about it. The architecture is very futuristic, and there are big shiny lights in and around the building itself.
However, I often go to the Metreon and don't spend a thing, because they often put up gimmicky things like this and I'll go regularly to check for a new exhibit. When Minority Report was in theaters they had the cool car design in it on display, in full scale. Last time I went they had an "interactive projector" where you blocked the projector's light from above with your body and it changed what was displayed in that area - for example, revealing a new picture, or making ripples.
Sometimes they still manage to suck me in and play their DDREX machine, though. But $2 for five songs is too much! As are the $2 sodas.
Let's say we weren't talking merely about Valve's relatively small product line here, but a large publisher, like all of Sierra. Buying a subscription for a month or two would allow you to play through and enjoy EVERY game in the collection at least once, like a rental without the middleman. When you finish, you let the subscription expire, and then if you want to go back to one of the games you can buy the boxed version and keep it forever.
I think it's a wonderful idea, personally, though Valve is taking a risk in trying it with so few products to offer...
But someone had to be first and I'd say they do a good job business-wise even though they're a little frustrating when they do things differently from any other industry company. Anyone else, if we exclude 3drealms and DNF, would have had HL2 out in a year or two.
I think these two comic formats have very different venues from each other. A comic book is meant to have more than a 10-second total viewing time, and usually has a more involved story and has a larger time to develop the action. The strip, on the other hand, must be satisfy the reader on a daily basis, and usually has to stick to formulaic jokes in three or four panels to succeed.
Correspondingly, in the physical world, the comic book is sold by itself, while the comic strip is tossed in amid a sea of other reading material(other comics, ads, articles...) and left to "sink or swim" as it will.
I think a similar dynamic applies online. The web-comic in strip format generally relies on advertising to succeed, but a full web-comic book might get somewhere through micropayments.
But I can say fairly confidently that nobody would pay money to view one strip.
I read in the paper(or was it a magazine?) recently that compared digital thumbprint scanners that could be used with a PC's USB port. The prices given for these scanners were mostly in the low $100 range, but the minimum was more like $70. The quality on them was generally good(with the occasional misses, but retrying corrected the problem).
:P
The software they came with didn't seem to have a "signature" feature, just a "password-entry" one, but the technology could probably be applied fairly easily to that sort of endeavor. In a few years or so the price will drop enough so that everyone can afford them, and we won't need this sort of stuff anymore.
Of course, there's the problem of people with no thumbs, or thumbprints(a rare condition), and people who steal thumbs on the black market...but we can deal with that as it comes up
If you haven't noticed, when people are unemployed, they find other outlets for their time and energy, whether that's volunteer work, going back to school, or starting their own business.
All that is really needed to make a smooth transition is extensive amounts of education for a new set of jobs.
Consider: If the cost of food and manual labor services drops to near zero, then people will have MORE money to spend on other items. Therefore those industries when human abilities are still needed will GROW tremendously, and the consumption of travel, entertainment and other luxuries will become even more widespread than they are today. As has happened previously throughout the centuries, innovation will gain in value relative to craftsmanship(we don't see scribes or blacksmiths around much anymore except as a luxury service - we can manufacture what they used to do for us. Likewise with the move towards abstracted art - photographs can contain more realism than any painting)
This will in turn cause those businesses to expand, demand new jobs, etc. and therefore solve our problems, and while it might be a rough few years during the transition, people will eventually find the skills the new economy will require.
Of course, if humans become obsolete in all respects, that's another thing altogether...
They can keep up because the tools to do what was expensive a few years ago are affordable today. I'll cite an example of my own creation: Using the free integrated development tool, "Game Maker," I made a game in 72 hours for a competition. You can see the game here on Simtel. It's a fairly simple kind of game that you might've seen in the mid to late 80s selling for $30-40, and likely with graphics of lesser quality, too(the tiles probably would have been better and more diverse with more time to play with them, but they didn't have the same resolution or color depth then). It would have taken probably at least a month to make, depending on the platform. But I did a 2003 equivalent in three days, with 10 levels, sound and music and recordable high scores, because I had the tools to do it.
A small team today can get into game development through the shareware market, which has always had its share of diamonds among a rubble of uninspired clones and "1,000,000 variations on Solitare." Consider 3drealms and Epic, both of whom brought themselves up through shareware sales. There are developers today pulling out success at the "low" end, too, like Popcap, Dexterity, and GarageGames. But you'll notice that they never go in the console market, because consoles realistically are a playground for the industry giants, with a market that faces significant challenge in expanding demographic reach(it's a chicken-egg situation - no games to appeal to a new segment, no segment to buy those games) and no method of distribution outside of retail.
A lot of attention is put on the console market, where it seems like a lot of action takes place. And it seems like big budgets lock small developers out. But in reality, larger budgets mean less innovation. All the best games of today are evolutions or reworkings of previous games. GTA3 comes from GTA, which itself was taking a new angle on the maze games of yesteryear(Pac-Man etc.) The Sims is a new angle on Simcity. Diablo 2 is a new angle on Rogue. All the Lucasarts games have their heritage in ADVENT. These are not triumphs of technology, but good design and well-rounded development. It stands to reason that in reality, there is nothing stopping a small developer. Their only limit is that they can't push the envelope in ways that will break their bank. If they want to go for the high end, they can start small and build up with sequels that evolve the technology each time. The market will prove whether or not they are worthy. And the little guys will never get hopelessly far behind, either.
It's common for /.er's to root for open-source and Linux vs. Microsoft and their various products. But when you take an article like this into consideration, it's hard not to notice that if Microsoft loses the war, all the people they pushed into using their products will suddenly have skills they can't use. The job market will probably go through a period of turmoil, as there may not be enough of the "new skills" to go around and the MS-trained workers have to relearn a new environment.
And of course, the funding would disappear.
But all sorts of strange things seem to happen, these days, so perhaps this will come about...
Me, I'm trying to learn things non-MS.
I've always gone for featureset when looking at graphics cards. Speed is a secondary and usually fairly costly function.
If I need the speed, I turn off AA and lower the resolution and game detail settings. But if it's fast enough for me as is and looks like it'll suffice for a couple of years, I don't care about the benchmarks.
It's obvious to anyone who takes a decent glance at the product history of MS that they could never sell a product simply because it's faster, more secure, and more stable than previous versions. It must look cooler and have more features to be released.
When I first heard of what sort of things Longhorn would bring to the UI(m0er pretty graphix0rz), I thought it was idiotic, and just wouldn't be enough of an improvement to sell the OS to anyone(except the OEM market - IF Linux doesn't manage to shape itself into a major competitor in that market by then).
So far I don't see anything to change that opinion. The only real UI improvement I see is more text telling you what you can do in each screen, and more application-shell integration.
That's not really enough progress, in my opinion. The computer market is not growing as fast as it used to, and I think a lot of existing users, even if they aren't particularly tech-savvy, will feel absolutely insulted at an interface that babies them along, because they already took the time to learn how to do these things "themselves" on some level.
Also, it took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was going on in that volume control help dialogue. I get the impression that their excess of features is spilling over on itself and making it LESS usable than before. It looks bulky, not sleek and trim the way I think most people would want it.
And open-source continues in the rest of the world like it has, then it will be a government-backed monopoly versus an open-source world.
China may be big, but it's not THAT big. They'll eventually give up on any private company's offering, even when it's within the country, because it's quite likely that for business and personal purposes, the Chinese people will not use the government's choice, but the international one.
So if the government supports open-source, it's a good thing all around. If it doesn't, it'll be a setback but not a mighty one.
...is the kind of program I'd sell so that I can continue to make programs.
I prefer to work within a social order that seems to be in a "stable release" form.
Windows will be almost gone by 2008. There will be significant improvements in all aspects of tech by then, and Linux will both carry and be carried by the waves of new devices and applications rolling out that will use Linux and therefore support it(directly or indirectly).
:P
With a few more years of improvement at the current rate(and maybe less time if the rate increases with a larger dev-community and more funding!) Linux is likely to reach a point of critical-mass, at which point the market will suddenly flood over and give up Windows forever. This will happen even for Joe Average, as he someday discovers that he can't download or purchase much of anything new for Windows anymore. All that will remain will be Microsoft's in-house products and labels, tucked in some back corner of the computer store. And Slashdot will have to get rid of the Borg-Gates icon because it'll never be used anymore
...we might finally get affordable supersonic jet transportation?
I can't stand flights of over an hour or two myself, and it would probably encourage even greater mobility then we have today if it's cheap enough. For example, transcontinental dating.
SCO declares that it holds the copyrights to LoveSan and demands that all clones pay a $1500 licensing fee.
How well will "freestyle congas" work out among the music-game crowd?
I can just imagine it now: People using their feet, knees and elbows to show off their conga skillz ^^
I decided to go about getting a GOOD e-mail client today for college(previously using Yahoo webmail since I can reach it from anywhere and I don't really care who gets in that, so long as they aren't clever enough to start using it to request passwords to other places...but now I have a new account, so time to shift things around). I soon settled on Moz Thunderbird because I wanted to support the project and I expected it to be a lot more secure than OE.
It is fitting, then, that MS should decide not to support the client I don't want to support.
One thing that'll help Nutch financially is that they can use their technology for more than a single page running on their own servers(and taking on the huge loads that implies). They can use open-source business models instead, offering licenses with tech support, custom versions, etc.
I was always kind of worried that we might end up with an internet controlled by Google, anyway. But we'll have to wait and see if it actually works or not, anyway. I sure hope so.
When I was very little, I was unable to tell the difference between a really good game and a really bad one. They were all equal but also different. It was only later that I started to compare them with each other, and that still continues today.
:P
I used to play a lot of crap
I'm interested in getting into game development, and I think there are plenty of possibilities for making games that motivate people to learn. The key, I think, is in the power of games to be able to abstract the worst, least interesting bits of reality and highlight the fun stuff.
:P ), and I think could be resolved. But focusing on any one part of math to study invites trouble.
The trick is in presenting the material the right way. I know it's quite doable for physics, history, geography, and related areas - adventure and strategy games make use of that stuff all the time. It's things like higher-level math that are tougher - say you were making a game for calculus students. What would you have them do? If you just present the typical problems to them so that they cover all the bases, no advance is being made over doing problems out of a book. There aren't many exciting game-professions that you can use to give context to the calculus problems, either. It's a problem that I really can't figure out - math in a general sense is better suited to games(see all adventure games using little mini-puzzles that have no relation to the plot
Neither are there any games that teach people to write well or read great literature for meaning. (You could say that the game itself has literary context, however)