Merging a cellphone with an iPod make sense. A hands-free mic on the earbud wire would be all that an ipod needs. The thing could even auto-switch between cell and playback modes -- automatically pausing the song (and announcing the caller-id) when a call comes in and returning to the tunes when the call is over. A virtual keypad overlay on the jog wheel could provide a numeric keypad for dialing but most people would probably sync the iPod with iCal or some PC-based PIM and use the wheel to select the number.
One device on the belt and one device for the ears.
Intel has been doing for years (probably other chip makers too). Back in the late 80s, Intel produced a marketing tidbit key ring that had a 286 die on one side and a 386 die on the other embedded in a flat hexagon of resin. The dies were mounted on something printed with some bubbly marketing speak about power for today/ power for tomorrow yada yada yada...
The son of a colleague interviewed with both Google and MS and got job offers from both companies. He took the MS job because he felt the Google folks were more arrogant than the MS folks. The Google folks were quite shocked that he turned them down.
It's only one anecdotal data point, but it does suggest a simple fact of life. Success breeds arrogance whether a company is "evil empire" or seeks to "do no evil."
Leopard before Longhorn?
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Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wonder if OS 10.5 will arrive before Longhorn? Steve Jobs said that the company plans to release Leopard in late 2006 or early 2007.
Perhaps 2007 will see a 3-"L" competition on x86 -- Longhorn, Leopard, & Linux.
There are costs that fall on the person who's donating the cycles, and costs that fall on the person who's getting the benefit of them. Unless both people are in the same organization, operating under the same budget, it's not just a question of minimizing the total cost. In the typical situation, the cost to the donor needs to be almost zero, otherwise the donor isn't going to do it. Even in a university environment, one department may have a separate budget from another department. Or electricity may be provided from the campus without a budget charge to the departments, but other costs, like paying sysadmins, may be specific to the department.
Absolutely spot on! Something needs to align the costs and values of the exchange of CPU electricity and CPU value. For operations like SETI, the motivation to donate CPU time seems to be combination of coolness, charity, and some degree of apathy that residential electricity users have with respect to usage.
I think if grid computing is ever going to take off, it needs to become a capitalist enterprise. If someone would pay me a few bucks a day for my spare cycles, and the client was open-source, and there was close to zero hassle, I'd gladly do it. Remember, one of the good things about a free market is that it tends to be an efficient way to allocate resources.
Very insightful. Anything that has certifiable value (i.e., people can agree on what it is being offered and received) and can be "delivered" to others will end up in a marketplace if the transaction costs are low enough. With PCs and broadband, one could argue that this is readily possible. In fact, at some level, we already have a market for "spare cycles" in the form of the trade or renting of spammers' botnets. In the commercial world, IBM and Sun are working hard to make this a reality, too.
Of course, if anyone can "sell" their PC's cycles, then apartment owners will have to stop offering "utilities-included" leases. The day will come when some landlord discovers an apartment with a couple dozen PCs slurping down the kWh and raking in the money. If CPU time sells for just $0.25/hr/CPU (1/2 to 1/4 the resale value), a couple dozen PCs can bring in more than $50k/year.
Does anyone realize that running a CPU at 100% takes more electricity than running a CPU at 10%?
This is a very insightful post, but has two crucial counterarguments
Does anyone realize the cost of buying extra computers to handle peak computing loads?
Does anyone realize the cost of idle high-tech, high-paid labor while they wait for something to run?
The proper decision would balance these three (and other factors) in defining a portfolio of computing assets that can cost-effectively handle both baseline and peak computing loads. Idle CPUs aren't free, but then neither are idle people or surplus (turned-off) machines.
Understanding = images + contextual info
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Graphics in Science
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Graphics are especially prone to the problem of obscurity through insufficient context or shared knowledge. What is self-evident to the author, because they have worked for so long on the project, is often opaque to the viewer.
The problem is most felt in dealing with non-specialists. For example, all microscopists will instantly recognize the implications of a given visual patterns of an osmium tetroxide stain in an image. In contrast, other scientists, lay people, voters, politicians, PHBs, etc. need some grounding in what the image shows, how it differs from "normal" and what the image means. A few suggestions for improving the understandability of an image include:
textual summary: text creates reinforcement/redundancy
annotate the images: arrows, circled regions and call-outs help the viewer know what's important and what it is.
legends: color images, especially, need a legend or textual explanation of the color scheme.
supporting metadata: information such as subject, scale, time (relative to some event), etc. helps create meaningful context.
contrasting image pairs: Image pairs or sequences help cue viewers to the significant features or establish a pattern. Showing before & after, normal vs. abnormal, enhanced vs. non-enhanced, overview vs. detail, plain vs. peanut, etc. helps explain what's what.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if an image presenter wants the viewer to get the intended thousand words then a little extra annotation, metadata, and context can help.
I sure some of this is due to market-share issues. A developer targeting Windows knows there's 200 million new PC shipped each year (and probably a billion PCs installed). They figure that their software only needs to be good enough to snag only 1% of users to sell 2,000,000 copies a year and gain a 5 million user install base. In contrast, the Mac developer looks at Apple's 3% market-share (say 6 million Macs/year) and thinks that they need to attract 33% of the user base to reach the same target sales figure.
The result is that only the most dedicated and talented Mac developers survive whereas any idiot with a C-compiler can create a PC software title and be assured of some sales (just convince 1-in-10,000 PC users to spend $29 and you gross $600k per year). Given the huge market-share disparity, Mac software must be 30X as good as PC software to survive in its small marketplace. (OK, its a bit more complicated due to dilution by competing vendors, but I'm sure its much harder on the Mac side to attract an economically viable user-base for software package.)
Electric universe isn't the only interesting group out there. Some claim that comets are made of antimatter. If so the Tempel 1 collision should be a whopper. On the otherhand the lack of hard evidence (or hard radiation) coming from comets makes this theory a bit improbable. If comets were antimatter, I suspect we would have noticed the 0.51 and 938 MeV gamma rays produced when particles in the solar wind struck the comet.
The amazing thing about the human brain is its ability to parallel process. Although the recitation of digits was only at 6 baud, you're forgetting the massive amount of processing for the individual to:.........
Except for the last item, the blue jays outside my office can do all of them too. A bird may not be able to recite digits of pi, but some of them are able to remember thousands of food cache locations. In fact, they may even be able to do some of the last item based on some psych experiments on these birds that suggest they are capable of inferring the likely thoughts and future actions of other blue jays.
Yes, brains are amazing things but a creature really does need that much brain power to do most life activities.
I wonder when that little pop-up will start appearing on computer screens during incoming VoIP calls. I can think of a million ways MS could embrace-and-extend VoIP to add features that only work/ "work best" with MS software. Makers of VoIP add-ons will then test their widgets with MS only and not support "non-standard" operating systems.
83,431 digits is about 33.8 kB of data. Read out over 13 hours means the data rate averages under 6 baud -- and I thought 110 baud modem on a teletype was slow.
I don't even want to think about the write speed of this storage device. At least the storage capacity of the device has nearly doubled (from 42,195 digits or 17.1 kB).
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
So true. Judging by all the throw-away domain names I see in spam everyday (e.g., fqydahwviagra.scam), I wonder what percentage of the domains are real. I also wonder if some of the domain name expansion is just companies protecting themselves with alternate tradename spellings and TLDs
The article on why humans have so few genes does some nice hand-waving but fails to answer the core question. Sure, the genome can do some interesting combinatoric stuff to get more out of a given length of DNA, but that does not answer the question -- why should humans have fewer genes than something so simple as a mustard plant or rice?
I suspect the answer is related to human (mammalian) mobility and thermoregulation. If a rice plant gets stuck in a hot place, all it can do is use a different part of its genome to make proteins suited for hotter weather. In contrast, people can move out of the sun while their body basically maintains a constant temperature. Similarly if the plant faces too much cold, too much water, too little water, to much sun, too little sun, too much salt, etc. it can do nothing but sit there and hopefully pull something out of its genome that can cope.
The point is that plants must adapt to whatever their environment gives them much more so than humans. Human mobility and the ability to modify its environment means it is less reliant on gene-based adaptability.
Then don't publish the work until you have enough preorders. To promote your product, publish freebies. Then amortize the cost of the first copy of the work across all preorders. Besides, you can make money on value-added, hard-to-copy attributes such as good paper in a good binding. Cory Doctorow has taken this approach with his works.
I doubt pre-orders will work for that many items -- an artist has make a name for themself before anyone will give a pre-order. Who pays for a new musician/author's/film maker's early labor while they are trying to make a name for themselves giving away freebies? This model works if there are enough people that need service, not just content.
Even if you have a known-good property (e.g., the Star Wars franchise), there's no guarantee that the sequel is any good. Moreover, who would pre-order a viewing of a new movie if they : a) did not know the quality of the sequel (which must be unknown because you have to withhold publication) and b) the viewer knew that could snag a free copy within a few days of the release. I tend to watch movies months or years after they appear and would never pre-order anything.
I like your suggestions, but some don't make sense for some types of content. For medicines, there are no "hard-to-copy" feature. It is the fact of the regulatory approval that makes the drug valuable -- that approval is extremely expensive (averaging about $800 million to $1.2 billion per drug given all the costs of clinical trials and all the dead-end drug candidates). Once approved, the medicine is easy to copy. Moreover, its hard to create a pre-order market for medicine. I don't know if I'll need the next blockbuster anti-cancer drug and if I need it, I'd go with the cheapest available source.
Even for music, the idea is not implementable for a broad class of the fan base. For example, I like to listen to music in my home on my own schedule. I don't like concerts, don't care about the band, don't care about fancy boxed sets, etc. It is the music I want. The same is true for movies -- I've never even looked at the extra features on a DVD and don't care for theaters. The only thing of value that a musician or film maker has to offer me is a copy of the content (the easy-to-copy part).
If a work's copyright lasts 14 years, after which the work is available for others to create and publish derivatives, you'll see at least a few warez kiddies rejoining the light side, taking classic films and classic music and releasing their own reinterpretations on the net
I can only hope you are right. But I fear that most people prefer copying the latest hits from the latest artists.
If I am not mistaken, it is legal to buy the horseshoe, figure out a different way to make a device that protects the foot of a horse, then sell this new invention as competition for the horseshoe. But, if the horseshoe cost $100 million to develop, but the competitor only spent $20 million becuase they used concepts evident in the original horseshoe they bought, does the inventor of the original horseshoe have any claim to being undercut because his work was stolen? Or was his work even stolen if the concepts were evident just by owning the horseshoe? You can patent to process to make the horseshoe, but you can't patent every little concept involved with the thing. This is the type of case that really muddles the whole process because an endless grey area is created which is then sorted out with over priced lawyers. Who wins? Lawyers, mostly.
You raise a number of very good points. Reuse of a patented invention is a tricky matter and one of the subtle checks and balances built into the patent system. On the one hand, a second company cannot copy a patented product. If the second company creates something that seems to be too much like the patented item, they will be sued. On the other hand, the patent process forces the applicant to disclose the invention. In theory, the patent should contain enough information to allow someone else to replicate the invention even as it prohibits that replication.
As you allude to, disclosure enables the second company to invent an even newer product, building on the work of the first company and then leading to its own patented invention. Its an imperfect system, but it does try to encourage innovate by both protecting the financial fruits of innovation and by sharing the intellectual fruits of innovation.
Sadly, lawyers are a necessary evil in any complex society that claims to offer due process and the rule of law -- who shall represent the the two side in any ruling on that process or law? Most things, especially most innovative things involve the gray areas and it is up to lawyers (professional advocates for each side) to argue how the new circumstance or gray area can be made consistent with the body of case law, legislation, regulation, and the constitution.
If China becomes a dominant presence on the internet, I wonder when Chinese tech standards will become de facto standards for the net. Much as developers design for IE currently (regardless of the "issues" with IE), I wonder if future developers will target Chinese compatibility first, and ignore other de facto or de jure standards.
Does anyone know if China is adopting/promoting DRM (perhaps for content control), open standards (to avoid U.S.-centric Microsoft technology), IPv6, or other internet-affecting standards.
I wonder when planetary scientists will get a better picture of what's out there. The current observation techniques only pick up outrageously heavy planets with close orbits. Yes, I know this is inevitable given that the detection methods cue in on gravitational and occultation effects.
Once we can detect an Earth-sized planet in a 1 AU orbit, we should get a much better idea of the actual prevalence of Earths and the fraction of solar systems "like ours."
This is a false analogy -- here's a better one: say you make a horseshoe in your workshop. I then buy it from you. Is it now wrong for me to make my own horseshoes? These horseshoes I will make will not be taken from you -- they will be entirely my creation.
And this is a false analogy (admittedly much better than the break-into-workshop grandparent post). The horseshoe analogy trivializes the effort required to make the first horseshoe. For some products (medications, movies, games, music), the cost of the first copy is extremely large relative what any individual would be willing to pay. As you well-written post suggests, it benefits society to create legal structures that allow the creator to amortize the high cost of development across a large base of customers. This legal structure is embodied by IP law, including copyright, patents, and trademarks.
Copyright law is based on the same principle, except now it's about ideas rather than physical invensions. Again, we need to strike a balance between allowing the authors to get a return on their investment of time and work, and between our desire to profit from their ideas by selling them as their are (reproduction) or reworking them in new ways (making derivative works).
Absolutely true! Yet I suspect that most of the ongoing illegal distribution of media on the internet would still violate any of proposed changes to rebalance copyright suggested in the Economist article. What percentage of P2P music and video is older than 14 years? Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?
I'm waiting until I can run PHP and MySQL on a GPU. With advances in sorting, shader programming, audio processing, and general purpose computing on GPUs, its only a matter of time before someone decides to try to do build an http server, PHP, etc. on a graphics card. One might even argue that a GPU and its RAM would make a nice secure sandbox walled off from the CPU, HD, and main OS.
Why do this? Like all good hacks, its done because its almost (im)possible and certainly not intended.
Actually, it would be Fullwrite Professional (great word processor with outliner), Trapeze (an unbelievable awesome spreadsheet-like program - but it requires a bit of a hack to work on PPC machines), and Superpaint (a very nice bit-map & vector painting program).
OK, I admit to playing the occasional game of Daleks.
Although the 128k had many a kludge with respect to memory management, multitasking, etc. I'd argue that Apple had the right approach when it came to telling developers what to expect. Direct interactions with hardware were frowned on. Apple's early design guidelines were very explicit about NOT assuming anything about the hardware, file system, display, etc. Developers that took this advice to heart could create applications that were future compatible.
The result is that I still use some applications on a near daily basis that were introduced in 1987/1988. These apps could run on a Mac Plus (System 6, 8 MHz 68000, 2 MB RAM, 800k floppies) and now run on a dual-G5 (OS 10.3, 1.8 GHz G5, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB SATA HD).
Apple may not have designed pre-emptive multitasking into their early systems, but they did create a development ethos that meant that early applications were not incompatible with the major changes in both hardware and OS that occured later.
I'd been using computers for about 8 years when I saw my first Macintosh in 1985. I'd always hated command lines because I a) can't type worth a darn and b) can't remember arcane commands either.
When I saw a 128k at my university's computer store in March 1985 I immediately fell in love with its GUI - all the commands were right their in plain english and organized in convenient menus. I dragged my wife to see the thing and she fell in love with it too. We took our limited savings that we had intended for a spring-break vacation and bought a 128k, external floppy, and ImageWriter I for $1700 (an educational discount gave us about 40% off the list price of $2800). We even paid $34 for a box of ten 400k Apple floppies.
That machine was our main computer until the Mac II came out in 1987 and our 128k remained in use until about 1995. I still boot the machine occasionally just for the nostalgic sounds of the start-up bong and the whirr of the floppy drive.
Just because brains aren't binary or synchronously clocked doesn't mean much. One can create analog computers to represent shades of gray or create clockless computers that don't operate in lock-step synchronization. Furthermore, any digital, synchronous computer and simulate both shades of gray (with floating point numbers) and continuous processes (with sufficiently small time slices). Moreover, given the messiness of neuro-electrochemical systems, one can argue that it doesn't take a very precise float or a particularly dense time slicing to simulate neurons.
Some people ascribe the seeming magic of consciousness to some ineffable property of the brain, e.g., quantum mechanical effect. While other insist that its just what happens when you connect enough simple elements in a self-adaptive network.
The question is, are there neural input-output functions that are fundamentally not computable? If not, then a digital computer will, someday, reach human brain power (assuming Moore's law continues).
Slashdot Mirror
Merging a cellphone with an iPod make sense. A hands-free mic on the earbud wire would be all that an ipod needs. The thing could even auto-switch between cell and playback modes -- automatically pausing the song (and announcing the caller-id) when a call comes in and returning to the tunes when the call is over. A virtual keypad overlay on the jog wheel could provide a numeric keypad for dialing but most people would probably sync the iPod with iCal or some PC-based PIM and use the wheel to select the number.
One device on the belt and one device for the ears.
Intel has been doing for years (probably other chip makers too). Back in the late 80s, Intel produced a marketing tidbit key ring that had a 286 die on one side and a 386 die on the other embedded in a flat hexagon of resin. The dies were mounted on something printed with some bubbly marketing speak about power for today/ power for tomorrow yada yada yada...
The son of a colleague interviewed with both Google and MS and got job offers from both companies. He took the MS job because he felt the Google folks were more arrogant than the MS folks. The Google folks were quite shocked that he turned them down.
It's only one anecdotal data point, but it does suggest a simple fact of life. Success breeds arrogance whether a company is "evil empire" or seeks to "do no evil."
I wonder if OS 10.5 will arrive before Longhorn? Steve Jobs said that the company plans to release Leopard in late 2006 or early 2007.
Perhaps 2007 will see a 3-"L" competition on x86 -- Longhorn, Leopard, & Linux.
What about spam that is very negative: your too small, your credit is bad, you need pills, your account is about to be canceled...
I wonder if this makes some spam a health threat.
There are costs that fall on the person who's donating the cycles, and costs that fall on the person who's getting the benefit of them. Unless both people are in the same organization, operating under the same budget, it's not just a question of minimizing the total cost. In the typical situation, the cost to the donor needs to be almost zero, otherwise the donor isn't going to do it. Even in a university environment, one department may have a separate budget from another department. Or electricity may be provided from the campus without a budget charge to the departments, but other costs, like paying sysadmins, may be specific to the department.
Absolutely spot on! Something needs to align the costs and values of the exchange of CPU electricity and CPU value. For operations like SETI, the motivation to donate CPU time seems to be combination of coolness, charity, and some degree of apathy that residential electricity users have with respect to usage.
I think if grid computing is ever going to take off, it needs to become a capitalist enterprise. If someone would pay me a few bucks a day for my spare cycles, and the client was open-source, and there was close to zero hassle, I'd gladly do it. Remember, one of the good things about a free market is that it tends to be an efficient way to allocate resources.
Very insightful. Anything that has certifiable value (i.e., people can agree on what it is being offered and received) and can be "delivered" to others will end up in a marketplace if the transaction costs are low enough. With PCs and broadband, one could argue that this is readily possible. In fact, at some level, we already have a market for "spare cycles" in the form of the trade or renting of spammers' botnets. In the commercial world, IBM and Sun are working hard to make this a reality, too.
Of course, if anyone can "sell" their PC's cycles, then apartment owners will have to stop offering "utilities-included" leases. The day will come when some landlord discovers an apartment with a couple dozen PCs slurping down the kWh and raking in the money. If CPU time sells for just $0.25/hr/CPU (1/2 to 1/4 the resale value), a couple dozen PCs can bring in more than $50k/year.
This is a very insightful post, but has two crucial counterarguments
- Does anyone realize the cost of buying extra computers to handle peak computing loads?
- Does anyone realize the cost of idle high-tech, high-paid labor while they wait for something to run?
The proper decision would balance these three (and other factors) in defining a portfolio of computing assets that can cost-effectively handle both baseline and peak computing loads. Idle CPUs aren't free, but then neither are idle people or surplus (turned-off) machines.The problem is most felt in dealing with non-specialists. For example, all microscopists will instantly recognize the implications of a given visual patterns of an osmium tetroxide stain in an image. In contrast, other scientists, lay people, voters, politicians, PHBs, etc. need some grounding in what the image shows, how it differs from "normal" and what the image means. A few suggestions for improving the understandability of an image include:
- textual summary: text creates reinforcement/redundancy
- annotate the images: arrows, circled regions and call-outs help the viewer know what's important and what it is.
- legends: color images, especially, need a legend or textual explanation of the color scheme.
- supporting metadata: information such as subject, scale, time (relative to some event), etc. helps create meaningful context.
- contrasting image pairs: Image pairs or sequences help cue viewers to the significant features or establish a pattern. Showing before & after, normal vs. abnormal, enhanced vs. non-enhanced, overview vs. detail, plain vs. peanut, etc. helps explain what's what.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but if an image presenter wants the viewer to get the intended thousand words then a little extra annotation, metadata, and context can help.I sure some of this is due to market-share issues. A developer targeting Windows knows there's 200 million new PC shipped each year (and probably a billion PCs installed). They figure that their software only needs to be good enough to snag only 1% of users to sell 2,000,000 copies a year and gain a 5 million user install base. In contrast, the Mac developer looks at Apple's 3% market-share (say 6 million Macs/year) and thinks that they need to attract 33% of the user base to reach the same target sales figure.
The result is that only the most dedicated and talented Mac developers survive whereas any idiot with a C-compiler can create a PC software title and be assured of some sales (just convince 1-in-10,000 PC users to spend $29 and you gross $600k per year). Given the huge market-share disparity, Mac software must be 30X as good as PC software to survive in its small marketplace. (OK, its a bit more complicated due to dilution by competing vendors, but I'm sure its much harder on the Mac side to attract an economically viable user-base for software package.)
Electric universe isn't the only interesting group out there. Some claim that comets are made of antimatter. If so the Tempel 1 collision should be a whopper. On the otherhand the lack of hard evidence (or hard radiation) coming from comets makes this theory a bit improbable. If comets were antimatter, I suspect we would have noticed the 0.51 and 938 MeV gamma rays produced when particles in the solar wind struck the comet.
The amazing thing about the human brain is its ability to parallel process. Although the recitation of digits was only at 6 baud, you're forgetting the massive amount of processing for the individual to:.........
Except for the last item, the blue jays outside my office can do all of them too. A bird may not be able to recite digits of pi, but some of them are able to remember thousands of food cache locations. In fact, they may even be able to do some of the last item based on some psych experiments on these birds that suggest they are capable of inferring the likely thoughts and future actions of other blue jays.
Yes, brains are amazing things but a creature really does need that much brain power to do most life activities.
I wonder when that little pop-up will start appearing on computer screens during incoming VoIP calls. I can think of a million ways MS could embrace-and-extend VoIP to add features that only work/ "work best" with MS software. Makers of VoIP add-ons will then test their widgets with MS only and not support "non-standard" operating systems.
83,431 digits is about 33.8 kB of data. Read out over 13 hours means the data rate averages under 6 baud -- and I thought 110 baud modem on a teletype was slow.
I don't even want to think about the write speed of this storage device. At least the storage capacity of the device has nearly doubled (from 42,195 digits or 17.1 kB).
It seems that Netcraft is reporting on newly created hostnames (I'm assuming domain names) rather than actual sites. How hard is it to point multiple domains at one site? Not very.
So true. Judging by all the throw-away domain names I see in spam everyday (e.g., fqydahwviagra.scam), I wonder what percentage of the domains are real. I also wonder if some of the domain name expansion is just companies protecting themselves with alternate tradename spellings and TLDs
The article on why humans have so few genes does some nice hand-waving but fails to answer the core question. Sure, the genome can do some interesting combinatoric stuff to get more out of a given length of DNA, but that does not answer the question -- why should humans have fewer genes than something so simple as a mustard plant or rice?
I suspect the answer is related to human (mammalian) mobility and thermoregulation. If a rice plant gets stuck in a hot place, all it can do is use a different part of its genome to make proteins suited for hotter weather. In contrast, people can move out of the sun while their body basically maintains a constant temperature. Similarly if the plant faces too much cold, too much water, too little water, to much sun, too little sun, too much salt, etc. it can do nothing but sit there and hopefully pull something out of its genome that can cope.
The point is that plants must adapt to whatever their environment gives them much more so than humans. Human mobility and the ability to modify its environment means it is less reliant on gene-based adaptability.
Even if you have a known-good property (e.g., the Star Wars franchise), there's no guarantee that the sequel is any good. Moreover, who would pre-order a viewing of a new movie if they : a) did not know the quality of the sequel (which must be unknown because you have to withhold publication) and b) the viewer knew that could snag a free copy within a few days of the release. I tend to watch movies months or years after they appear and would never pre-order anything.
I like your suggestions, but some don't make sense for some types of content. For medicines, there are no "hard-to-copy" feature. It is the fact of the regulatory approval that makes the drug valuable -- that approval is extremely expensive (averaging about $800 million to $1.2 billion per drug given all the costs of clinical trials and all the dead-end drug candidates). Once approved, the medicine is easy to copy. Moreover, its hard to create a pre-order market for medicine. I don't know if I'll need the next blockbuster anti-cancer drug and if I need it, I'd go with the cheapest available source.
Even for music, the idea is not implementable for a broad class of the fan base. For example, I like to listen to music in my home on my own schedule. I don't like concerts, don't care about the band, don't care about fancy boxed sets, etc. It is the music I want. The same is true for movies -- I've never even looked at the extra features on a DVD and don't care for theaters. The only thing of value that a musician or film maker has to offer me is a copy of the content (the easy-to-copy part).
I can only hope you are right. But I fear that most people prefer copying the latest hits from the latest artists.
If I am not mistaken, it is legal to buy the horseshoe, figure out a different way to make a device that protects the foot of a horse, then sell this new invention as competition for the horseshoe. But, if the horseshoe cost $100 million to develop, but the competitor only spent $20 million becuase they used concepts evident in the original horseshoe they bought, does the inventor of the original horseshoe have any claim to being undercut because his work was stolen? Or was his work even stolen if the concepts were evident just by owning the horseshoe? You can patent to process to make the horseshoe, but you can't patent every little concept involved with the thing. This is the type of case that really muddles the whole process because an endless grey area is created which is then sorted out with over priced lawyers. Who wins? Lawyers, mostly.
You raise a number of very good points. Reuse of a patented invention is a tricky matter and one of the subtle checks and balances built into the patent system. On the one hand, a second company cannot copy a patented product. If the second company creates something that seems to be too much like the patented item, they will be sued. On the other hand, the patent process forces the applicant to disclose the invention. In theory, the patent should contain enough information to allow someone else to replicate the invention even as it prohibits that replication.
As you allude to, disclosure enables the second company to invent an even newer product, building on the work of the first company and then leading to its own patented invention. Its an imperfect system, but it does try to encourage innovate by both protecting the financial fruits of innovation and by sharing the intellectual fruits of innovation.
Sadly, lawyers are a necessary evil in any complex society that claims to offer due process and the rule of law -- who shall represent the the two side in any ruling on that process or law? Most things, especially most innovative things involve the gray areas and it is up to lawyers (professional advocates for each side) to argue how the new circumstance or gray area can be made consistent with the body of case law, legislation, regulation, and the constitution.
If China becomes a dominant presence on the internet, I wonder when Chinese tech standards will become de facto standards for the net. Much as developers design for IE currently (regardless of the "issues" with IE), I wonder if future developers will target Chinese compatibility first, and ignore other de facto or de jure standards.
Does anyone know if China is adopting/promoting DRM (perhaps for content control), open standards (to avoid U.S.-centric Microsoft technology), IPv6, or other internet-affecting standards.
I wonder when planetary scientists will get a better picture of what's out there. The current observation techniques only pick up outrageously heavy planets with close orbits. Yes, I know this is inevitable given that the detection methods cue in on gravitational and occultation effects.
Once we can detect an Earth-sized planet in a 1 AU orbit, we should get a much better idea of the actual prevalence of Earths and the fraction of solar systems "like ours."
Absolutely true! Yet I suspect that most of the ongoing illegal distribution of media on the internet would still violate any of proposed changes to rebalance copyright suggested in the Economist article. What percentage of P2P music and video is older than 14 years? Would those that illegally distribute first-run movies or games be willing to wait 14 years or any number of years to allow content creators to make enough money to pay for the cost of the first copy?
I'm waiting until I can run PHP and MySQL on a GPU. With advances in sorting, shader programming, audio processing, and general purpose computing on GPUs, its only a matter of time before someone decides to try to do build an http server, PHP, etc. on a graphics card. One might even argue that a GPU and its RAM would make a nice secure sandbox walled off from the CPU, HD, and main OS.
Why do this? Like all good hacks, its done because its almost (im)possible and certainly not intended.
Would that program be Klondike?
Actually, it would be Fullwrite Professional (great word processor with outliner), Trapeze (an unbelievable awesome spreadsheet-like program - but it requires a bit of a hack to work on PPC machines), and Superpaint (a very nice bit-map & vector painting program).
OK, I admit to playing the occasional game of Daleks.
Although the 128k had many a kludge with respect to memory management, multitasking, etc. I'd argue that Apple had the right approach when it came to telling developers what to expect. Direct interactions with hardware were frowned on. Apple's early design guidelines were very explicit about NOT assuming anything about the hardware, file system, display, etc. Developers that took this advice to heart could create applications that were future compatible.
The result is that I still use some applications on a near daily basis that were introduced in 1987/1988. These apps could run on a Mac Plus (System 6, 8 MHz 68000, 2 MB RAM, 800k floppies) and now run on a dual-G5 (OS 10.3, 1.8 GHz G5, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB SATA HD).
Apple may not have designed pre-emptive multitasking into their early systems, but they did create a development ethos that meant that early applications were not incompatible with the major changes in both hardware and OS that occured later.
I'd been using computers for about 8 years when I saw my first Macintosh in 1985. I'd always hated command lines because I a) can't type worth a darn and b) can't remember arcane commands either.
When I saw a 128k at my university's computer store in March 1985 I immediately fell in love with its GUI - all the commands were right their in plain english and organized in convenient menus. I dragged my wife to see the thing and she fell in love with it too. We took our limited savings that we had intended for a spring-break vacation and bought a 128k, external floppy, and ImageWriter I for $1700 (an educational discount gave us about 40% off the list price of $2800). We even paid $34 for a box of ten 400k Apple floppies.
That machine was our main computer until the Mac II came out in 1987 and our 128k remained in use until about 1995. I still boot the machine occasionally just for the nostalgic sounds of the start-up bong and the whirr of the floppy drive.
Just because brains aren't binary or synchronously clocked doesn't mean much. One can create analog computers to represent shades of gray or create clockless computers that don't operate in lock-step synchronization. Furthermore, any digital, synchronous computer and simulate both shades of gray (with floating point numbers) and continuous processes (with sufficiently small time slices). Moreover, given the messiness of neuro-electrochemical systems, one can argue that it doesn't take a very precise float or a particularly dense time slicing to simulate neurons.
Some people ascribe the seeming magic of consciousness to some ineffable property of the brain, e.g., quantum mechanical effect. While other insist that its just what happens when you connect enough simple elements in a self-adaptive network.
The question is, are there neural input-output functions that are fundamentally not computable? If not, then a digital computer will, someday, reach human brain power (assuming Moore's law continues).